[Book reviews] The end of "The Wheel of Time" as we know it
When I was in college, my roommate got me reading Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. I didn't really find the first book all that engaging... she had to pretty much tell me the entire plot of the first three before I became interested. (Unknown farmer lad is secretly the savior of the world? Yawn. But politics and magic? Now it's interesting.) I have slowly read each additional book as it came out, though there was a rough patch in the middle where I seriously considered giving up as the characters became increasingly caricatures of themselves. O editor, where art thou? Still, it did improve, and with one more book (no, he means it this time!) to go, I was looking forward to the conclusion of the series. And then Robert Jordan died.
The named successor to the series, Brandon Sanderson, has written a few books of his own. (To be fair, I only found out about them because Badali makes jewelry for fans.) Accordingly, I picked up his first novel, "Elantris", and read it to see what we were in for.
I liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it. Sanderson wrote some characters I cared about, even if they were a little too perfect to be believable. His premise of why we have The Inevitable Magical Epoch Change was decent, his religious zealots were not merely unidimensional, and he did a quite respectable job of keeping the characters moving and evolving as people. I am not going to make a terrible effort to seek out everything else he's written, but it was a perfectly serviceable airplane book. (I hope I'm not damning with faint praise there; I did like it.) So, from that, I'm guessing that he'll write a fair end to the Wheel of Time. He seems to do a better job of handling plot loose ends than Jordan has, so far, so that's auspicious -- one of my big fears for "Wheel of Time" is that many things will end up dropped, and we'll just never know what happened. I'm hoping that Jordan told him enough, or failing that, that he will just make it up. As long as it's in the book, I'll take it. (And if they kill off Nynaeve or Lan, I'm necromancing Jordan just to kick him myself.)
The named successor to the series, Brandon Sanderson, has written a few books of his own. (To be fair, I only found out about them because Badali makes jewelry for fans.) Accordingly, I picked up his first novel, "Elantris", and read it to see what we were in for.
I liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it. Sanderson wrote some characters I cared about, even if they were a little too perfect to be believable. His premise of why we have The Inevitable Magical Epoch Change was decent, his religious zealots were not merely unidimensional, and he did a quite respectable job of keeping the characters moving and evolving as people. I am not going to make a terrible effort to seek out everything else he's written, but it was a perfectly serviceable airplane book. (I hope I'm not damning with faint praise there; I did like it.) So, from that, I'm guessing that he'll write a fair end to the Wheel of Time. He seems to do a better job of handling plot loose ends than Jordan has, so far, so that's auspicious -- one of my big fears for "Wheel of Time" is that many things will end up dropped, and we'll just never know what happened. I'm hoping that Jordan told him enough, or failing that, that he will just make it up. As long as it's in the book, I'll take it. (And if they kill off Nynaeve or Lan, I'm necromancing Jordan just to kick him myself.)