The story continues!


I liked how we had everyone apart at the start of the book, and all together by the end of the book.
Rand was going nuts, poor thing, I'm glad we didn't have much of his POV in this book.
Mat got a bit better for me--seeing his POV helped me get to know his personality and reasoning a bit better than the previous two books. He was still annoying to me though, and depending too much on his luck/ta'veren-ness!
Egwene has been dropping in the ranks for me too--in the first book she was just a stubborn young woman who was just discovering that she had this ability. Even in her point of view I don't feel like her personality is really settled or shining through. In the second book, Egwene comes a little more into her own with starting to learn to channel, and then the whole Seanchan part just was a huge trauma that really formed who she was. In this book, she's definitely got some PTSD issues, but also was annoyingly whiny and immature to me--why always at odds with Nynaeve???

I'm enjoying the plot and the books--this book had more tension and action in the last 150 pages, instead of the previous books where all the climax was in the last ~35. So I appreciated that. And this was fun to feel all the threads come together again, by all being in Tear and having similar goals.
One frustration that I mentioned during the book group's live chat was that I feel like I can 'see' the workings of this series--the bad guys are clearly bad, there are plot points that are clearly marked and started--I think that fans would say that the things that happened 'too conveniently' are because of the ta'veren and channeling. But to me that's kind of cheap--to have the deus ex machina be 'because it was meant to happen that way.' (Am I being harsh?)
Also, the romances in this series SUCK.


I'm excited to keep going!