The Dragon Reborn, by Robert Jordan

Okay. I can't. I can't keep going on with this series. I know I'm only on the third book but seriously, I can't keep spending time on this series if it's going to be more of the same stuff. And it's not even the fact that this is stuffed full of your standard fantasy tropes, there is just something seriously wrong with this series.

Okay, so, I'm going to briefly address the plot problems, which is definitely an undermining element to this series. As I've mentioned in my reviews of the last two books there has been this really unfortunate habit where everything gets resolved really quickly in the last few chapters of the book and it feels a lot like an anticlimax more than anything else. And once again that happens in this book. Our characters wander around, pursuing different goals but converging upon the city of Tear where a legendary artifact for the Dragon Reborn which will fulfill a prophecy and verify that Rand al'Thor is in fact the Dragon Reborn. And all the problems within the book are just...resolved...at the end. It feels like a huge anticlimax, especially when the last book ended with a brief exposition that armies have risen to support the Dragon. But when we start this book we find Rand's been hiding somewhere in the mountains all winter while the armies that rose to support the Dragon are slowly being picked off. It just doesn't make any sense to me why Rand wouldn't be gathering support to achieve political goals.

But plot issues aside, there's something which really annoys me about these books and it's how men and women are stereotyped throughout the entire book. The weird thing is this book was published in 1991 so you'd think that it would have moved beyond gender stereotypes of the 1950's, but apparently that's too much to expect. Basically in this book and in the books before it all the women are depicted as shrewish harridans hell-bent on controlling men and making things go their way. The men meanwhile are all depicted as ignorant lummoxes whose only solution to any problem is to hit it with a big stick enough times until it stops being a problem. This is in every darn book so far and considering the books don't seem to vary at all I expect it to be in the next twelve books as well.

And honestly, I'm completely sick of it. These are gender stereotypes which are material for a fifties sitcom, not for a fantasy series written forty years later. It was dated when this book came out, and it's even more dated now. And if the series is going to keep relying on these awful stereotypes I see no reason to keep bothering with the rest of the books. It's like Jordan is constantly saying, ''Women, amirite? Men, amirite?''

So this is it. I gave this series a try with three of the fifteen books and I'm calling it here. The plot hasn't been terribly great so far, but it's this reliance on old gender stereotypes that really kills the series for me.

- Kalpar

The Great Hunt, by Robert Jordan

I managed to get my hands on the second book from the library rather quickly so today I'm looking at the next book in the Wheel of Time series, The Great Hunt. While it moves away from cribbing largely from Lord of the Rings, I feel like this book is still leaving a lot to be desired. Jordan does a lot of work establishing aspects of his universe and creating additional plot threads, but I feel like we're still waiting for the main plot to get kick-started.

Let me take a minute to talk about the characters, which is difficult because there's about a thousand of them and at this point it's hard to tell who's going to be important and who's going to just be minor characters. (Although there's a possibility all of them will be important, so I can't even.) So let's start with Rand, Perrin, and and Matrim. These are three young men who grew up in the small town of Emond's Field and get called to adventure in the first book, along with the characters Nynaeve and Egwene, but more on them later. All three men have the ability to channel the one Power, which means all of them are destined to have a great influence on the world. Rand specifically as it turns out is the Dragon reborn, which is a sort of messiah-cum-destroyer end of days figure. Jordan pulls pretty extensively from Taoism so there are a lot of things being two things at once within his series.

Anyway, these three men are chosen ones, Rand being slightly more chosen than others, and they are involved in the hunt for the Horn of Valere. The horn is one of your typical artifact macguffins, it's tied to a prophecy regarding the final battle and whichever side has it will be able to summon a hundred slain heroes to their side, etc etc. Anyway, the characters found the horn in the previous book and had secured it in a vault. However this book begins with the bad guys successfully stealing the horn so now our heroes have to go get it back. The horn actually changes hands a couple times in the book but the thing that bugged me is that the hunt for the horn gets put aside a couple of times as characters get distracted by other plotlines. Specifically Rand gets lured by a beautiful woman to visit a city where deadly games of politics are occurring. I was 90% sure the woman was luring Rand into a trap because he kept making bad decisions based on what she was advising him to do, but it ultimately led to nothing other than him wasting a bunch of time.

Then there's the arrival of conquerors from over the sea, claiming to be  descendants of a warrior king from the age of legends. It looks like these conquerors are planning on reclaiming the known world and enslaving all women capable of channeling, but as of right now all it does is throw another ball into the air when we're still waiting on the Dark One plot to get going. And this doesn't even get into the brief amount of time Egwene and Nynaeve spent at wizard school. (Sort of wizard school, anyway.)

That's really my biggest problem, Jordan seems to have way too many things going on at once and the result is a muddled plot at best. It's sort of like the issue with Song of Ice and Fire as the series went on. We kept getting more and more characters, and more and more plotlines, and the result is a massive, tangled kudzu vine with no potential clarification in sight. If I can, I guess I'll keep trying these books from the library, but there hasn't been a lot of promise so far.

- Kalpar

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

Against my better judgement, I've decided to try listening to the Wheel of Time series originally by Robert Jordan. This series actually had a bit of a reputation at my high school because the school library had copies and it was considered a challenge for people to read because there were so darn many book in the series. Seriously, there are fourteen main books in the series, not all of them written by Robert Jordan because he died partway through writing the series. This series also has a reputation for being super trope-tastic, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does leave the reader feeling like they're just in somebody's own attempt to create Lord of the Rings. Having finished the first book I can safely say it is very definitely chock full of tropes and at least follows the same general pattern of Lord of the Rings if not running in the exact same grooves. However, with thirteen other books to go, hopefully there's an opportunity for the series to develop beyond the first book.

I was actually kind of disappointed with the first book, Eye of the World, and I think it's because it spends so much time establishing the universe of the book while vaguely dancing around the main plot. You do get the impression that Jordan has developed a deep and complex world for his characters, possibly with lengthy genealogies as well, but I feel like Jordan spends way too much time on the development and just not quite enough time on moving the plot forward. Let me see if I can draw a comparison.

Remember how there's that first part of Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are leaving the Shire but haven't gotten to Rivendell yet? Their main quest at that point is escaping from the pursuing Ringwraiths and reach Rivendell safely, but we don't get to the real quest involving the One Ring until the Council of Elrond. This first book feels a lot like that. The characters are trying to leave their home of Emond's Field in the Two Rivers and reach the city of Tar Valon, where everything will be explained to them there. More importantly the servants of the Big Bad are chasing the protagonists so it's important that they reach safety. Now I don't know about the rest of you guys, but for me that part between the Shire and Rivendell was the least exciting in the entire series. (Looking at you, Tom Bombadil.) So if the first book of this series is entirely like that, it's not as much fun for me either.

The finale for this book is also really rushed. Our main characters finally link up and go off to fight the Big Bad (Known as the Dark One, incidentally) utilizing an artifact from a previous age known as the Eye of the World. And then the main characters...win. The Dark One is defeated, presumably dead, and the day has been saved. This is all within the last few chapters as well, mind you, so it's kind of weird how it abruptly ends. Obviously the Dark One is not truly defeated because there are a baker's dozen more books to go and it's implied he's not really dead, just temporarily defeated. But for the amount of time we spent not knowing where we were going or what had to be done, the ending felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

Hopefully as the series goes on we'll get some more development and the characters will get fleshed out a little bit more for me to know them better. (In typical fantasy fashion they have overly elaborate names so I have to go do research to find out how to spell the darn things.) But as a start it leaves a lot of room for improvement.

- Kalpar