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The women come out somewhat better, though even they start to wear thin. Perrin’s constant whining about Faile (and her equally infuriating inscrutability), Mat’s endless cursing and ranting about women, and Rand’s just general whininess, do not age well. This is also the point where I start to get increasingly irritated with almost every main character. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the scope and the breadth of the storytelling it’s just that I wish it weren’t mired by all of the parts that are so infuriating to read that I just skim them.
LORD OF CHAOS WHEEL OF TIME SERIES
While I’ve always appreciated the sprawl and scope of the series as a whole, there are times when I believe an editor’s ruthless scalpel could have trimmed out some of the less necessary bits. Almost every epic fantasy that goes beyond three or four volumes falls into this same trap). (I don’t mean to suggest that he is alone in this. I know that some people enjoy this aspect of Jordan’s writing, but for me it is its greatest flaw. There is a lot that goes on in this book, but the major plot points either come quite near the end or are drowned in the sort of bickering and endless squabbling that seems to mire the characters every other chapter.
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However, I also found this to be a challenging book for a number of reasons. And it’s hard not to feel a rush of emotion when these two extraordinary women are at last given back a measure of the life they had thought forever lost. Though they are weaker than they were–the idea that some things can never truly be changed is a hallmark of the series–the fact that they can be healed at all is extraordinary. However, there were a number of important developments in Salidar, in which Nynaeve discovers that stilling can indeed be healed, and both Siuan and Leane are given back their ability to channel. The battle that leads to his escape is one of the most powerfully written sequences of the book (and the series as a whole up to this point), and makes the whole book worth it. The high point of the novel comes in the last few chapters, in which Rand is captured by Aes Sedai from the White Tower. The pieces on the game board are shuffled a bit here and there, but it’s not really until the final third that the major action happens. In this novel, a lot happens and, simultaneously, a lot doesn’t happen. Well, I’m charging headlong through “The Wheel of Time,” and now that I’ve finished Lord of Chaos and am on the cusp of finishing A Crown of Swords, I thought I’d take a few moments to catch up on my blog posts about the series.