I'll keep this brief for now as I'm on my phone, but I like where the plot has taken us:

With SPOILERS







The light is clearly in the best situation it has been for years, and the main characters are communicating at last. Rand is back on track and is awesome, even if his new superpowers mean the DO himself or some nasty tricks will be needed to beat him. The genuine feeling of danger that Rand might turn to the dark side was what made TGS so poignant for me, and the optimism from this book had a similar though opposite buoyant effect. All the characters are maturing even if they are sometimes still misguided, however this transition has seemed to have sped up too much in this book - it should have been more evenly spread. Rand's personality change is justified by the end of the last book but the others' epiphanies are a little too sudden for me. Maybe that's just me though. Great things happened in this book but were covered too quickly. If books 7-10 were compressed into one fewer books and then 11-13 spread out over one more, the balance of detail and plot progression would be far better IMO. Everyone had Crowing moments of awesome but they were too often and too briefly described. The writing style, though quite refreshing in its approach, is too shallow sometimes and we don't get as much subtle insight into characters as I'd like. Sanderson tells too much when he could show given more time and has characters outright state and think things better shown more gradually. But with the time pressure to finish etc I can understand why this happened.


That said the balance for the last book is interesting: The Light are finally cooperating, reconciling and communicating, The Taveren are all back in the game after their distractions and problems and plot threads are being sorted. The light now have the chance to hold most of the world going into TG, noone is struggling against the pattern and it looks like there could be a good chance of some hope after TG with marriages and children etc.

Counterpoint to this is the Black Tower dodginess, Moridin still a threat, red veiled Aiel, millions of Shadowspawn, Demandred still an unknown quantity, Slayer still around, the odd dream with Lanfear at the end, the TP and how Rand's link to it and his wounds and unhealable madness might affect things, trollocs in andor, the seanchan and all kinds of other things that show that whilst the world is in better shape than a book or so again, things are still in the balance.

I'm tired now, after a marathon read, but so excited for the last book.

Jac

That said, the balance for the last book is intriguing: the light are finally working together