Winter's Heart (The Wheel of Time, Book 9) (edition 2002)

Komt wat traag op gang maar toch een van de betere delen. Al was het maar door dat geweldige einde. ( )

One the one hand, wrapping up one of the biggest arcs in the series in suitably epic fashion? Excellent. Doing so with a maximum of Emo? Much less excellent. Also, the Perrin/Faile plotline is in fact my very least favorite plotline in the entire book. And Elayne's plotline is better - it fails in tedious ways, not infuriating ones - but only a little bit better.

Note: In general, I can't review this series with any objectivity. I've been reading it since I was eleven years old, and it's thoroughly embedded in my brain. ( )

Still love this book. Really, really excellent. ( )

Sometimes I think Robert Jordan got paid by the word. Winter's Heart is so overwritten and has page after page and chapter after chapter of content that does nothing to move the story forward. If you cut the novel in half, it would still be too long for what actually transpired. Nothing of real consequence actually happens until about the last 20 pages, which is unacceptable for a 600 hundred plus page novel.

There are other issues with the novel, namely the unwieldy cast of characters that are impossible to keep track of. Basically there are maybe about twenty characters in the series who matter, and about 500 hundred minor characters. There's just no need to have that large of a cast. As a reader, I don't have any interest in following that many characters, and it only serves to water down the characters who do matter.

As for the content of the story, Perrin appears in the very opening of the book and is never heard from again. This is an example of a major character who has been marginalized in favor of the thousands of characters who follow in the book. The storyline with Mat, which dominated a large portion of the book was uninteresting and seemed to go nowhere. The Rand storyline, other than the last twenty or so pages, also seemed fairly inconsequential.

The bottom line is that Robert Jordan had lost his way at this point. I have been told to stick with the series because it gets better. I suppose I have invested too much to drop it, but picking up book number 10 will is about as appealing as a dentist visit right now.

Carl Alves - author of Blood Street ( )

In Winter's Heart, the ninth installment of Robert Jordan's epic series, the author learned the lesson from his previous entry (The Path of Daggers) by having one of the myriad of character arcs from the beginning of the book develop over it's course so as to reach a conclusion at the end of the book. This dominating character arc was the series' primary protagonist, Rand al'Thor aka The Dragon Reborn, who's dual goal was to kill those who had attempted to take his life at the end of the previous volume and to cleanse the male half of The Power from the Dark One's taint. The other strong point of Winter's Heart is the return of Mat after being missed in the previous book, like what happened to Perrin in The Fires of Heaven. Elayne and Perrin's arcs continue as well, though they are tertiary in the grand scheme of this book especially as Perrin's is partial seen through the eyes of his wife, Faile.

Jordan's return to having a dominating story arc that gives the book a beginning, middle, and end is big improvement over The Path of Daggers. However, of all the story arcs given space in this volume only Rand and Mat's seem to have traction throughout. Elayne's arc is broken up into several portions through the book while Perrin is gone after the first third of the book. It seems that in correcting the problem Jordan had in The Path of Daggers, he messed up the transitions from story arc to story arc that were a plus from The Path of Daggers.

Whatever the flaws, the last 34 pages of Winter's Heart can make up from some of them. The last chapter, With the Choedan Kal, is one of the best (but not the best) that I've read in the series so far and by far the best since Book 5, The Fires of Heaven. Overall I'm giving Winter's Heart a 3 1/2 stars like The Path of Daggers, because while some of the mistakes of the previous volume were corrected it was at the expense other important elements making them balance out. ( )