Book Review: Wheel of Time Series

For just over a month now, I’ve been reading the “Wheel of Time” series like a maniac! Hence the lack of posts recently. Usually I enjoy writing a bit before starting work, but lately I haven’t been able to help reading the books. But all that’s over now. 11 books completed (Knife of Dreams being the last till now), leaving me feeling a bit empty – as I knew I would feel before it got over. So it’s time to restart the blogging and what better than to review this awesome series.

Wheel of Time – The Good

There are a lot of nice things about the Wheel of Time series. The first is an awesome premise of how magic happens in the book. It all hangs together making it internally consistent. This is something that most scifi/magical works don’t have. Usually you can pick out holes and wonder why such and such happens or doesn’t happen, but Robert Jordan has created a world where magic is almost like physics.

Image Credit: Lars Ivar

Secondly, there are some wonderful characters in here. I’m referring to the primary and secondary characters totaling around 25 (a rough guess – I could be off). They each have their own story lines and their own challenges sometimes working in consort with each other and sometimes alone. This gives a lot of dimensions to the series. Some people like a few characters and hate others, but no one hates all of them.

Finally, the backdrop is quite epochal. The end of the world (no less!) is coming and that provides a sense of urgency.

Wheel of Time – The Bad

Magnificent as the series is, it has a few critical flaws. I’ll go so far as to say that the first few books are flawless. Likely that is what gets readers hooked. Later on however, Jordan begins to ramble on. Entire chapters are devoted to people’s thoughts as they move from one room to another. And while his descriptions of the scenery and the dresses were alright early on, they really begin to bog down in the later series. I’m afraid that most readers will find themselves skimming through long descriptions of fashion to get to the meat of the chapter.

Another big problem is that too many characters are introduced that serve no purpose to the main plot – or even beyond a few pages. A book can have a few of these, but not so many that a reader has to familiarize himself or herself with a new person at every stage. And since we don’t know at the beginning whether or not a person is going to be important to the series, we can’t just skip it.

A few books make almost no mention of the primary characters at all, and therefore are almost bereft of any plot advancement. This is sad since it becomes obvious that Robert Jordan is trying to delay major changes in order to continue the series. But of course, something happens in every book. Book No. 10 was the worst where I had to skim through large portions of the book to find anything important.

But each to his or her own. Some might enjoy the detail and fleshing out. Not for me though.

Summary

To say that the Wheel of Time is gripping, is an understatement. You can’t put the series down as you have to know what happens next. As I said, its power structure is awesome and forms the basis of the whole book. Read and enjoy!