Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson review

I read this book pretty damned quickly. Eight-hundred fifty pages in about four days. So it seems a bit odd at first that I'd only give it a rating. Well, the main reason I read it so quickly is that I was able to just skim through chapter upon chapter of completely useless writing. Perrin doesn't want to be a leader. X thinks Y is childish. Mostly it was the Perrin stuff. Damn, that's been going on for at least 16 books (and this is only book 13). I admit that the chapter (or, well, the part of the chapter) where he finally decided to embrace the fact that he was a leader was pretty good. It was quite well-written. Also, it meant we wouldn't have to trudge through any more of the same-old crap.

One very significant problem with this book, the series in general, and any POV-style writing is that it goes overboard with the "show, don't tell" mantra of storytelling. This means that the story is often told through the point of view of characters who are not only not protagonists, they're actually completely throw-away. So, the author spends page upon page of defining a character so that something can be shown through that character's point of view rather than simply told by a narrator or told to a protagonist. Either of the tellings would take a few paragraphs rather than a few chapters required by the showing. Not all POV-style authors succumb so mightily to this, but Jordan certainly did and Sanderson is carrying on the tradition when finishing the series.

The worst part about this book is that, because the last volume was a vast improvement on the previous five or six installments, I had pretty high hopes. But this volume was definitely a step (or maybe two steps) back. In the last volume, we finally saw some character development after a hiatus of about 8 books. Character development stopped and in some cases even regressed in this volume. Characters were different, especially Rand. The change in his character was substantial, yet so sudden that it didn't really make sense.

Still, this did have some decent action and certainly brought the story to the point to which it can only end in one final, verbose volume. It had plenty of Mat Cauthon, who was always my favorite character in the series. And it had some conversations that appeared to be taken from <forum:Junk>, which I found hilarious and made me wonder if Brandon Sanderson has been lurking there.


/ [Viking]

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