Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

844 Pages Hardcover (Fantasy Fiction)

I was convinced to continue the rest of The Wheel of Time series and after finishing Towers of Midnight I am now only one book from being done. You probably know that the original author Jordan died. Brandon Sanderson was given the hefty burden of finishing a much loved series. Personally, I think he has done an amazing job and has revived what seemed to be dying series.

There have been a ton of characters, storylines, and crossing over that it is impossible to cover them all. Towers of Midnight does focus a lot on the Two Rivers folk. Enormous hordes of Trollocs have started to flow out of the blight. Rand has accepted that he will die and realizes that he can be a human. Perrin deals with the problems of being a lord. He also struggles to balance the real world and what is happening in the wolf dream. Mat leads a band of mercenaries and gets pulled into a deal with an Aes Sedai. He finds out that Moraine may not be dead and that he has a chance to free her from her fate.

This only barley touches the surface of what is going on. A good deal is spent on a borderland army holding off the attacking Trollocs. Every so often we get to see the beginnings of Lan’s army. Egewene now sits as head of the Aes Sedai and has to deal with a series of killings happening within the tower. While there are inklings of things going wrong within the Black Tower.

Before Sanderson had taken over the series I had given up on it. The first 6 books were great and I wanted to find out more. With each book after that it seemed to get more drawn out and less interesting. As a reader I had become connected with the Two Rivers folk a lot of the story had strayed away from them. It had gotten bloated and uninteresting. All these promises of fantastic things were being doled out in small doses. Unfortunately, for Jordan all the exciting and cool things we readers we hoping for are now being told by a different author.

I really got into this book and read through the book in record time. Some days I was reading 100 or more pages I was so interested in what happened next.

3 Intellectual/Emotional: The characters that we care about are what this whole book focuses on. It was a joy to finally get back to them.

4 Style/Readability: I felt like Sanderson finally just started to write like himself. Instead of just writing like Jordan I now get to enjoy it in his style. In past books there were times I felt Jordan’s writing was immature and I didn’t feel that in this book.

4 Long Term Impact: This must be judged as a whole series. The Wheel of Time is a part of fantasy fiction and will continue for a long time. I am glad that Sanderson is making this shape up nicely. Now he needs to go back and condense books 7-10 into one.

11 out of 13. If at some point you read this series and got up through the 9th book I think it is worthwhile to come back and read from there. If you haven’t started this series, I still cannot recommend you start.

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