December Books 1
Dec. 30th, 2009 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienRobert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, The Gathering Storm
I'm giving this one its own post, because it's hard to say much about it without spoilers.
It's a Wheel of Time book, and not at all a bad one. Mostly, the characters and setting felt seamlessly consistent with the late Mr. Jordan's work. There was lots of corporal punishment, as usual, but somebody, and I have my suspicious who, sneakily subverted the whole trope, demonstrating how pointless and ultimately counterproductive it is. The plot progresses briskly, with Rand striving to get everyone pointed in the right direction for Tarmon Gaidon; there was one long sequence with Mat and friends that seemed a little pointless and overdone.
The one real problem I had was with Verin. Something about her characterization, in the two scenes she's in, seemed off; the speech patterns were all wrong, and that rather spoiled the effect of her big denouement for me.
I'm giving this one its own post, because it's hard to say much about it without spoilers.
It's a Wheel of Time book, and not at all a bad one. Mostly, the characters and setting felt seamlessly consistent with the late Mr. Jordan's work. There was lots of corporal punishment, as usual, but somebody, and I have my suspicious who, sneakily subverted the whole trope, demonstrating how pointless and ultimately counterproductive it is. The plot progresses briskly, with Rand striving to get everyone pointed in the right direction for Tarmon Gaidon; there was one long sequence with Mat and friends that seemed a little pointless and overdone.
The one real problem I had was with Verin. Something about her characterization, in the two scenes she's in, seemed off; the speech patterns were all wrong, and that rather spoiled the effect of her big denouement for me.