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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samnell" data-source="post: 1903410" data-attributes="member: 130">The first three are very strong, like everyone's saying. I'm in the middle of rereading the series to date now. I've only gotten so far as I am (nearly done with Lord of Chaos) this once, but I've reread the first three several times.  Jordan's two major weaknesses I see as a writer are his apparent inability to run with a character very long any more and his women. Since Book 4, he's become totally scatterbrained. His major characters are all over the world and he can't bother to stick with one for more than a few chapters. This can be a big let-down when he throws you up to a great cliffhanger and then drops it in favor of a must less interesting subplot. I can forgive that in part because he does set up some of the cliffhangers very well, but over the last half of the series he's become pathological about it. He'll drop one of his three main characters for a whole book. The latest book had the series' chief protagonist present only in an epilogue.  The women. Uh, I'll say in Jordan's defense that fantasy fiction has at best a mixed history of portraying female characters well. Jordan definitely makes them more than designated mates for his males. But over the course of the series they slowly change from being strong and in control (if a bit sexist, I think everyone in the WoT universe has got to be a major sexist) to being a band of increasingly similar harridans.  The pacing is something that Jordan's fighting with sometimes and sometimes has beaten fairly well. Path of Daggers is truly an atrocious piece of crap, but while Winter's Heart takes place over maybe 10 days it's built far better. Crossroads of Twilight, the latest, is a return to something of the Path of Daggers problem. I think a part of this comes from every single character in the book being more paranoid and secretive than a whole world of J. Edgar Hoovers. The end of WH makes you think they're set to start cooperating for the first time in like seven books, but Crossroads tells us that Jordan was just fooling and WH is an isolated incident.  The big divider in between the first five or so books and the later seems to me to be that Jordan switches over from a sort of journey/quest oriented plotting to something approaching political intrigue. He's better at the quest stuff.</blockquote>

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