A Crown of Swords

Rating 2 of 5

A Crown of Swords is the seventh book in Robert Jordans famous Wheel of Time book series.

My reviews of the series

• The Eye of the World
• The Great Hunt
• The Dragon Reborn
• The Shadow Rising
• The Fires of Heaven
• Lord of Chaos

As these stories are rather long, rather then review the plot I’m just going to refer Wikipedia for a plot summary.

All I can say about this book is, “meh”.

Its kind of long and I don’t feel a like a lot really happened.

You have to deal with a lot of annoying Elayne and Nynaeve hunt for the bowl of the wind fruitlessly and act like total jerks to Mat.

It feels that Robert Jordan has lost interest in the Thom Merrilin character because even though he goes to Ebou Dar with Elayne and Nynaeve he’s basically ignored.

Perrin is pushed aside and mostly just setup for a future subplot.

You spend a good deal of time feeling sorry for Mat as he has to deal with Elayne and Nynaeve being jerks to him for most of the book. He saves their lives again and they continue to ignore him and for all his trouble he gets a house dropped on him at the end of the book.

Rand continues on his pace of being an arrogant asshole. He continues with his “women should not be hurt” dork trait. Its all rather grating. He jumps right into the meetings of his enemies and gets stabbed by Padan Fain and his evil dagger. And you’re just like what? Why? It all feels a bit dumb.

Then suddenly he’s in Shadar Logoth battling Sammael? The battle is underwhelming. It often feels that the Sammael character has no real plan and I wan’t convinced that he was really a challenge to Rand.

Why does some strange villain help Rand in Shadar Logoth? What was the point. It just feels overly convoluted and not that exciting.

And then there’s Egwene’s march towards Tar Valan where nothing interesting happens.

Its hard for me to reflect on many highlights in the story. It sort of drug on for me. My fondest memory of the book is the end when Rand is handed the Crown of Swords after defeating Sammael it did feel like a iconic moment. But if your favorite part of a book is its ending, that’s not a good sign.

I think if I didn’t know the series was going to switch to Brandon Sanderson at the end I’d probably consider quitting reading the books soon. The story and characters are starting to blend a bit and I’m starting to lose interest. I think I’ll keep reading though mostly because I want to finish the series and I’m interested to see how Brandon Sanderson finishes it. Two reasons are probably enough to finish actually reading the books.