Book 56 of 2022
Sep. 18th, 2022 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vivdunstanJust finished The Shadow Rising, book 4 of the 14-volume Wheel of Time fantasy saga by Robert Jordan.
On the downside it was a very long book, and felt like a slog at times. 1005 pages of story on my Kindle, and the longest book in the whole series.
The story does open up and also deepen in places here. New locations are introduced, and similarly new foes encountered. Though the latter sometimes suffered from being spread too thinly, without enough development or coverage in every case.
Another downside was that the story was split into too many strands, that it could become confusing, and not all would get the attention they deserved. I was also personally less interested in the storyline that I think was probably regarded by the author as the main one, and constantly wished to return to some of the others.
However it was a fun read, and in particular it further developed and deployed a marvellous fantastical storytelling element that I adore but don’t want to detail for spoiler reasons. There was one particularly surprising shock plot twist that made me go “What?!?!?” And I want to see where it all continues. But yup, a shorter read would be nice!
I dithered a long time between 3 and 4 stars in my Goodreads rating, eventually settling on 4, rounded up from what I’d probably rate as 3.75 out of 5 stars.
On the downside it was a very long book, and felt like a slog at times. 1005 pages of story on my Kindle, and the longest book in the whole series.
The story does open up and also deepen in places here. New locations are introduced, and similarly new foes encountered. Though the latter sometimes suffered from being spread too thinly, without enough development or coverage in every case.
Another downside was that the story was split into too many strands, that it could become confusing, and not all would get the attention they deserved. I was also personally less interested in the storyline that I think was probably regarded by the author as the main one, and constantly wished to return to some of the others.
However it was a fun read, and in particular it further developed and deployed a marvellous fantastical storytelling element that I adore but don’t want to detail for spoiler reasons. There was one particularly surprising shock plot twist that made me go “What?!?!?” And I want to see where it all continues. But yup, a shorter read would be nice!
I dithered a long time between 3 and 4 stars in my Goodreads rating, eventually settling on 4, rounded up from what I’d probably rate as 3.75 out of 5 stars.