The Dragon Reborn

Oh man, this one was a bit of a struggle. I've heard if people don't like this one, it's usually because of the lack of Rand. But that was a feature, not a bug, for me. Bland could be his Rand self off screen just fine. But the stuff we did get had a lot that didn't work for me. The Aiel are super interesting, and I'm glad Mat and Perrin got some much needed development, but that's my major positives here.

The inter-gender relationships in this series are beginning to really bother me. The yada-yada of action/important scenes after long chapters of nothing happening was disappointing. I fundamentally don't believe any of these characters act like friends at any point and either Jordan didn't have friends or he had bad friends because I'm not willing to pretend these people are actually friends at this point.

The ending of all three books up to this point has been exactly the same, to a laughable level. All the villains of this series are chumps that are built up to be frightening and then as soon as they see a main character, they slip on a banana peel or something and are immediately dispatched.

Finally, the character of Faile is the worst and made it hard for me to enjoy anything happening in the second half.

The first two books of WoT I enjoyed, and I'm told the series reached new levels in book 4, so I will definitely be continuing. There was a lot of character development and world-building in this one (Jordan's continued highlight is worldbuilding) and I think in retrospect, I could appreciate what it does for the long term.

5.5/10