Thursday, November 5, 2009

Book Review: The Gathering Storm

This is Book 12 (out of 14 ... I hope) in The Wheel of Time, a series I've been reading since high school. I met the author once at a book signing, and have read the series on and off again, and just when I got back into it with Book 11, the author passed away. Fortunately he left copious notes and half-written scenes behind. The work was passed to a new author and now everyone wants to know how it worked.

Well, it's just fine. The action moves along about twice as fast as previously, and though there's an occasional false note of a moment (particular when things just sound too much like a movie to be true), the plot is definitely authentic and the writing works for me. There's a climactic battle that I was slightly disappointed by, and another character's descent into darkness that impressed me the other way (though the resolution of that was, again, just a little too cinematic for me). I'm just happy to know what happens and to finally see it happening, even if it's not perfect, and see it heading toward an endgame after two decades. This one worked and I'm confident the next ones will too.

12 X 800 pages = 9600 pages down, about 1600 to go.

1 comment:

Deanna said...

Adam tried to get me interested in the books... what, twelve years ago? No luck. I guess I've been too busy absorbing the minutiae of Star Wars and Star Trek to dedicate myself to anything else.