Crossroads of Twilight

With Crossroads of Twilight, Jordan's gargantuan fantasy sequence The Wheel of Time reaches its tenth huge volume and hits some of the consequences of its own sheer scale. Jordan is running so many story lines--the struggle with the covert agents of evil, the creation of a male magic that is not polluted, the war with magic-using dragon-riders from across the sea, the adventures of a travelling circus--that he has to spend almost all of this book just keeping us in touch with the movements of his characters and how they are getting on.

This is a book with a fair amount of incident, but nothing you could really call a climax. One of Jordan's strengths has always been his ability to send things off at interesting and imaginative tangents, revealing that his is a stranger world than we have begun to know--there is not enough of that here, and rather too much in the way of confrontations and kidnappings and dilemmas of conscience that recapitulate things he has done before. His decent, lumbering "grey" style means that there are no moments when the writing thrills us either--this is a book for those who have committed to Jordan's sequence for the long haul rather than one for new readers to sample. --Roz Kaveney

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Twilight of the series - Rated
After reading the other nine books i looked forward to this one to. Bought it, read it, then realised that nothing had happened to advance the plot in any way. Curiously i still enjoyed the book, i suppose because i'm so mired in the world that i'd have accepted anything. Good news is book eleven is much better.

*sigh* - Rated
I came to this book with a slight downer from Winter's Heart. The ending of that book was enough to make me buy this (in huge hardback form) and the style and presentation of the book is beautiful.

The prologue is, by the way, in the order of 100 pages. You have to come to this book having read the others recently because it is very very complicated with a myriad (probably literally a thousand) of characters to remember what they are up to and who they are, which side they are on etc.

I ended up stopping reading this book halfway through. The only reason (three years later) I am going to pick it up and read it from the beginning again is because I have heard the 11th is really good again, and I've just finished re-reading all of the previous books.

Worth buying if you want to finish the series (when book 12 is published posthumously). I'm too involved with the characters to let them get away unfinished.

Truly, deeply, awful - Rated
Bad? Nope, that doesn't do it.
Terrible? not that either?
Awful? Getting warmer.
Woeful? Hmmm, close.
Boring? Definitely but no cigar yet.

Insipid? Tedious? Vapid? Plodding? Banal? Unstimulating? Apathetic? Stagnant? Monotonous? None really, truly, deeply, thoroughly encapsulate this book.

Bear in mind just how tediously, mind-numbingly boring previous books were, then multiply that by a hundred - only then will you be on the path to grasping the sheer turgidity and waste of paper that this book represents.

Sadly only by reading this utter tripe will you fully comprehend just how bad it is.

It's only good point is that it makes all other books seem better.

His waffling lasted longer than he did... - Rated
...apparently Robert Jordan died a few days ago, his latest installment unfinished.

Now I know that the series will never actually get finished it's even harder to justify reading the rest of this waffle!

There are another 171 people before me who have expounded the boredom of all the braid-tugging and skirt-straightening. This books just didn't go anywhere, I'm gonna step off the Wheel of Time right here and pretend that it ended with the climax of book six.

Where'd the magic go? - Rated
after my epic adventure reading steadily through all Robert Jordan's heavy Wheel of Time books,i feel like i am now grinding to a halt.

All the Aes Sedai seem to just be milling around doing nothing, as does Perrin (who has lost all interest now his precious Faile has gone and is now spending ten pages moping)and Rand, who continues to annoy me in refusing to communicate to anyone save Min. the only interesting character is Mat, but it is hard to truly commit to a book when all his story lines get shoved aside to make room for pointless moaning.

Sorry, but this saga is growing far too long. i never thought i could possibly think this, as a fantasy storyline that seems to just keep going would be great for me, but it leaves the reader worn out and impatient. i don't see how robert jordan can possibly tie up all these loose strings in his tale to make a fantastic ending where everything comes to gether, but coming to the twelve book when new mysteries are still being unravelled is ridiculous. i hold great respect for mr. jordan to be able to keep all these threads running, but a fantastic finale clashing everything together in different ways is really what the Wheel of Time saga needs right now.