WOT v12

Book Review:

The Gathering Storm is book 12 in the never ending series The Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan wrote books one through eleven and did so very well. I have read and re-read novels one through eight just so that I could continue up to and include eleven. I was both saddened and worried by his death. Sad that such a great author had died before finishing his magnum opus and worried for how it would be completed.

Recruited by Jordan’s wife, Mr. Brandon Sanderson picked up where Jordan had left off. The Gathering Storm is one of the best in the WoT series. It only took me a little while to blend Jordan and Sanderson’s voices together to make the novel flow as it should.

One particular difference I noted was in how Sanderson made the characters I had come to appreciate as young adults, into the adults they truly needed to be in order to move through their world. I think through deeper and richer internal and external dialogs, as well as impossible situations where surviving was miraculous, Sanderson got them all to grow up quite a bit. All the while, he was able to maintain the character’s underlying make up without flaw.

While the last few novels in the series began to bog down in politics and campaigns of war, this one really pulled me out of the overseeing omniscience and back into the characters.

Great read. I have a renewed hope for the end of this saga. Great job Sanderson. Well done!