Erin

First Impressions:

I've never been a Wheel of Time fan. I read this book sometime back in high school, and was not really inspired by it. I started book 2, but never finished. It was too high fantasy for me, if you can believe it.

Since I remember so little of the book from when I read it in high school, and since reading Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson keeps me up at night, I decided to give this novel another try. So far, 20 pages in, I feel the same as I did back then. Although the prologue was intriguing, especially the part where Dragon turns himself into a volcano, the narrative itself is wordy and uninteresting.

After the prologue, we have Rand al'Thor riding with his father to the Bel Tine festival. There are some interesting elements that caught my attention: the ‘traditional' elements, where the people of the town don't remember why things are done, but just that it's always been done, so why change? I am also interested in seeing the role of women in this world. This town has a Women's Circle, which the men are not allowed to interfere in. They elect a woman to be ‘Wisdom', whose role seems to be predicting the future–how the weather will be, what kind of harvest they can expect that year, etc. So far, the reader has had only one interaction with a woman, Wit's wife, and she seems unpleasant. I usually enjoy stories with a more direct female role, someone who I can directly relate to, so I'm not sure how much I'll enjoy this novel as it is told (so far) from the perspective of an adolescent male.

Other than my thoughts on the traditional elements and the gender perspective, I haven't found a lot to pull me in. I'm not fond of the writing style. Robert Jordan spends a lot of time describing the surroundings. As a reader, I don't find it necessary to know exactly how much snow is under the trees. I can appreciate that winter is lasting much longer than it should, but how many times do I need this thrown in my face? I get it already, Jordan! The winter is lasting too long and no one is even sure they're going to get a good harvest. So far we've heard this from 3 or 4 characters, and from the descriptive narrative from Jordan himself (omniscient). I get the point. Stop beating the dead horse.

That said, this will certainly help me sleep better at night.


UPDATE

Dammit, it started getting good. Had to force myself to put the book down at 11:30 last night. This may not help me sleep after all. Robert Jordan is painting this idyllic setting of the inside of Tam and Rand's home–cozy fire, stew bubbling, the two men performing their tasks in harmony and without complaint–when suddenly, there is a pounding on the door, followed by the door being kicked down by a giant man with a snout, ram's horns, and hooves. I have to say, it caught me by surprise. Jordan had pulled me in with his slow descriptions, and the leisurely pace of the events. I was expecting to be bored for another few chapters based on this presumption. Then suddenly, Tam is hacking Trollocs down at the door, and Rand is running for the woods. In rapid succession, Rand reunites with Tam–who is now injured and feverish–in the woods behind their home, Rand then goes back to the house for supplies, kills another Trolloc, fashions a litter, and starts dragging his father toward Emond's Hill. Along the way, a troop of trollocs passes, lead by the mysterious horseman, and Tam is muttering feverishly, telling stories of war and finding a baby, blue in the cold, and taking it home because he and his wife cannot have children. That's the chapter I finished the night with. Dammit Jordan, why couldn't you have continued to disappoint me? Now there are two books I can't read during the week because I will never sleep.

UPDATE

It took me a long time to finish this book. It is a very large book, and parts of it are very interesting, while other parts are pretty mediocre. My boyfriend promises me that things get better by book three. Book 2 is in my queue, so we'll see how far I get this time around.

 Honestly, pretty boring. I get that this author focuses on characters, but there's literally nothing driving the “story” until the very end. I also didn't understand how Tessa's narrative fit in with the rest; at least all the other characters were directly affected by Sawyer's death. Tessa and her family basically just use it as a reason to move to a planet. I'm not sure that was a worthwhile arc to include in this book. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel by Brandon Sanderson! I've been meaning to read it for some time now, after finishing the Mistborn trilogy and Way of Kings. I knew right off that this was Sanderson's first novel. I felt like the characters and plot were less complex than his later novels. As a writer, I enjoyed the simplicity of the story structure. The plot felt like a lot of concentric circles of ideas. This one simple event occurred, which struck off a ripple of complication, which created another ripple. These ripples collided with ripples from another set of complications, creating new ripples. The characters worked backward through the complications to determine what caused the big overlying issues of the story. I think I could use this technique in my own writing. I really appreciate Sanderson's writing for this reason alone. He uses simple techniques to create complex worlds and characters, and builds idea upon idea for a logical story structure.

SPOILERS

As I mentioned previously, I did feel that this novel's characters were less developed, or maybe just less complex than his later characters. Their motivations and masks were two-dimensional. The most complex character was Hrathen, who was the only character to go through a significant transformation by the end of the novel. His history, personality, and motivations were hidden further beneath the surface than the rest of the characters. I had trouble deciding whether I liked him or not, throughout the novel, and I'm not sure if that is because of Sanderson's writing, or because his character seemed wishy-washy. Was the character insecure and undecided, or was Sanderson undecided about the character? At times, I felt that I should hate Hrathen. But at the end, he came through for the characters I was rooting for when the real villain came to light. I kept mistaking Hrathen for the cold-hearted conqueror, and then getting thrown every time he showed remorse or regret for his actions.

SPOILERS

This was the first book of Stephen King's that I've read. I loved the way he played with words, played with the reader, and immersed the reader into the story. The cast of characters was huge, and King handled them masterfully. I was constantly impressed with his ruthlessness. The book begins and ends with killing, gore, and horror. The idea of a city being isolated from the rest of the world by an impenetrable, invisible dome is unique and entertaining. King did a great job exploring the possible consequences of an event like that, exploring the nature of human fear especially. The main villain became more and more horrifically inhuman as the novel went on (before dying a completely human death). The reader was taken to the very edges of hope and pulled along toward the end, constantly wondering how King was going to pull this off. Several times I thought he would just end it with everyone getting blown up, or suffocating, or killing themselves.

The only thing I was disappointed about was that it was aliens. I personally prefer explanations that are a little more terrestrial, since I tend to think that ‘it was aliens' is a bit of a cop-out.

Entertaining at times, perplexing at others.

At the start of the story, Sirantha Jax is “recovering” from a crash that killed her pilot and every other person aboard ship. She is a jumper, meaning that she has a special gene that allows her to navigate grimspace, essentially a faster than FTL method of navigating large distances in space. Being a jumper requires being metaphysically linked with a pilot, which usually results in a romantic connection as well. Jax is reeling from the loss of her pilot and the trauma of the crash, while her employers are forcing psych visits on her that are meant to break her, so they can pin the whole thing on her. It takes a while for Jax to come to that realization though.

Before she breaks, she's rescued by a grim, gruff man named March. He convinces her to leave with him and together they make it back to his ship, where the rest of his crew waits for her. They literally cannot leave without her, because their previous pilot and jumper are both dead, having died in the effort to retrieve Jax. She immediately takes the guilt of their deaths on herself and forces herself to jump with March as her new pilot, which feels like a betrayal to her previous pilot Kai.

From this escape, they pretty much jump from disaster to disaster, all the while Jax is taking every little bit of guilt she can gather from every interaction. This is around the time where I start to get pretty frustrated by Jax. She's literally making no decisions for herself; she is a passive crewmate that allows everyone else to make decisions for her and just goes with the flow. She asks zero questions about what her rescuers intentions are. Eventually we get a few answer, but Jax's passivity is incredibly frustrating, especially since she's our narrator for the entire story. It's all just happening around her.

In addition, she starts to take on a familiarity with the rest of the crew that is really difficult to believe, given that she's know them for all of a day or so? The timeline is pretty blurry, especially in the beginning. She starts to make comments about the other characters, like how “March is never not mean to her” which is a pretty big generalization when he really hasn't been mean to her at all and if anything, she's been pretty mean to him; not to mention that, again, she's been with him for about a day or two and that whole time they've been constantly running from things. She makes these sorts of generalizing comments about all of the characters, with very little basis to them.

The only relationship that feels remotely well-paced is the one between Jax and Dina. They start out pretty openly disliking each other, but the way their relationship evolves over time feels much more realistic than the rest of Jax's insta-connections, and I found myself really enjoying a lot of the banter between them.

The first time I really start to like Jax, and actually connect with her character, is when she says enough is enough and leaves the crew. She finally makes a decision for herself and actually voices an opinion of her own, and stands her ground! Granted it's 70% of the way through the book at this point, but it was nice to see her with some actual backbone. Obviously she eventually has to go back, and Doc makes sure that she does go back. But it's easier to accept her relationship with March when she does go back, because she's had time to process her trauma and her conflicting feelings about him after the loss of Kai.

The ending gets wrapped up pretty quickly after this. The foreshadowing from all the times where March warned Jax about his dark past is fulfilled when he decides to take a bunch of hostages and threaten to blow up an entire city when he thinks Jax is dead. Luckily Jax shows up just in time to talk him off the ledge, while her brand new bounty hunter friend releases recordings of Jax's innocence and the Corps' evil plans to the public, resulting in riots and rebellion across the galaxy.

Sure, sure sure sure.

In the end, I think this story wanted to be big and epic with some dark, scary, bad-ass characters. But it tried to do that without doing a lot of the work to make it believable. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief long enough to feel the things I think the author wanted me to feel. There were moments that I genuinely enjoyed, and I'm hoping that maybe the next books will improve on the story-telling enough to let me fully enjoy the story!