Le dragon réincarné

For book number 3 I was no longer wearing my rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. All the inherent flaws of later books that drove me away were already present in this book. Is it possible that people have normal relationships with each other? Our trio of Aes Sedai in training are catty bitches, to each other, and to others, and Nynaeve's excessive tic of braid tugging has begun. I get it, she's an angry lady with issues, so she yanks on her hair until it hurts. Over and over and over again.

Same with Perrin and Zarine. Do people fall in love like that? I don't really know. It was irritating.

The book was also too big, could have done with some editing. Too much time to get going, only the last quarter being exciting in any kind of way. Tons of pacing issues.

That said, I am still invested to see this through, and hope that a shift in focus back to Rand, away from the other cast of characters can only help.

I've finally started consulting the Wikipedia pages for these books that I'm reviewing that I finished a few weeks ago, and so I can say with certainty that this is the one where Rand runs away and we know that he's feeling really angsty and going through some shit but also we're following other characters in the meantime, so we don't have to deal with all the personal growth that takes place during this book directly. At this point in the series I think Perrin has started to grow on me, awoo, but Mat is as annoying as ever because all he ever wants to do is run away sans the personal growth bit. The girls go off to do their thing but they have no idea what they're doing, and it's a wonder they survive. It's a wonder any of them survive, really. How did this series not end on Book 1?

This book has a cool climax with a cool sword that is depicted on the front of the book, and we get to meet the Aiel, who are fucking badass and oh so very different and hard to understand, something that will brought up every single time we see the Aiel again in this series, which will be a lot. Have you heard about their sense of humor??? And their sense of honor??? What could it all mean??? So weird!!!