Book four of The Wheel of Time is where I began to have some doubts about finishing this series. I knew going in that I was setting myself up to real fourteen books, which is more than I have done for any other series. Though I found the first book, The Eye of the World, to be derivative (of Lord of the Rings and Arthurian legend in particular) at times I enjoyed the story and characters enough to continue on. The second novel, The Great Hunt, is my favorite of the series so far. It took an interesting world, expanded it naturally, and set the main characters on a path that didn’t feel so similar to the path of the Fellowship in Lord of the Rings.
Book three was not quite as good, but I actually enjoyed the controversial choice it made to barely follow the main character so more time could be focused on the supporting cast. I found the chapters following the inner workings of the Aes Sedai and the city of Tar Valon to be the most interesting.
The Shadow Rising returns part of the focus onto our main hero Rand, and I think this story is worse off for it. He is a pretty typical “Chosen One” in a fantasy story and taking a book off from his perspective makes him feel more unfamiliar here. It is not really helped that this part of his story is very reminiscent of the journey of Paul Atreides in Dune. He feels less reluctant of his destiny, but also much more secretive of his plans and what he is thinking. So you don’t get a real sense of struggle or turmoil and it begins to feel like he is almost going through the motions.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed the narrative of Rand’s friend Perrin, who separates from the main group early in the story returning to his home for the first time since their departure in the first book. Is it a little similar to the scouring of the Shire in Return of the King? Yes, but it is a longer and more fleshed out version of that type of story so I did not mind.
The other section of this book that really drags the book down a bit is the Nynaeve/Elayne storyline. Robert Jordan is not great at writing women and these two are probably the ones that he does the poorest job with, so pairing them together both as point-of-view characters can be rough. I credit Jordan for having a lot of powerful female characters, but they spend a lot of time thinking about and complaining about the men in the series. It feels very much like a CW teen series in spots, but even in those shows, the couples at least seem to like each other.
In summary, there is a lot here that I still enjoyed, but at 900+ pages there’s also just… a lot.