Postby Mr. Hat'n'Clogs » Sat Oct 16, 2010 6:32 pm
The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan.
If you saw my earlier post regarding this, then you'll see that at the beginning I thought this may be Jordan's best. After all, Jordan's weakest parts are usually the beginning(especially the awful four hundred page beginning of The Dragon Reborn) and this was going to be a solid read, living up to The Great Hunt.
Apparently Jordan just wanted to make us think that. After about page 250 we switched to Nynaeve and Elayne, with whom almost nothing happens for hundreds of pages. Jordan can't seem to write about them without telling us about Nynaeve tugging her braid, specifics on the dress they're wearing, how incompetent the men(who have saved them multiple times) are, and long, boring descriptions of characters who we'll never see again and are largely unimportant. Eventually, they're a little important to the plot, but the hundreds of pages it takes do so drag and drag.
Everyone else's plots, however, are pretty great. The Siuan/Leane/Min team don't do a lot, but they also don't take up tons of page time. Morgase is important to the plot, and takes up equally little pagetime. Rand and co.'s story is equally great, and I enjoyed all I read from it. However, I'm still failing to see what relevance Melindhra had to the plot.
So Jordan, it seems, has more of what he's good at doing, and more of the bad. Nynaeve took several levels in annoying, presumably to make up for the lack of time Egwene had, and Rand's "Oh, men are dying all around me but I'm going to obsess over every single woman that dies" gets really old, really fast. Mat remains a good character, and Aviendha is much less annoying in this book. Asmodean was interesting.[spoiler]Moiraine's death scene is one of Jordan's best pieces of writing, and she is redeemed to me.[/spoiler]
All in all, good, but disappointing. If you read this, you should probably skip all the Nynaeve/Elayne chapters and just read a summary, except, maybe, the chapters with Uno in a prominent role. 7/10