Agreed. Or if he wrote in collaboration with someone who is a better technical writer. But as it stands, his dialogues make me cringe still after nearly eight years.




I keep saying to myself he's still a "young" writer (I think he's 1-2 years younger than my 38 years), but the development has not been quick or consistent, to say the least.



Way of Kings felt somewhat bloated to me, but I'm speaking from memory of a single read back in August 2010. I will likely re-read it sometime this year or next before the next volume comes out, but I do not look forward to that.



Indeed. I think I said somewhere, maybe in my review, that there was an odd expansion/compression issue with several scenes here. I'm certain if I re-read the previous two books (which I haven't), I would find some similar cases, but it was really noticeable here, especially in the scenes that you mention. It felt like the opening expository-type scenes were too long and the important scenes too disjointed and brief due to a lack of narrative rhythm. While I understand that the epilogue was (mostly) RJ and that little could be done about that particular abruptness, there were just simply too many scenes that ended mid-scene with no "payoff" to them over that brief mentions elsewhere that diminished the impact. I can understand it happening occasionally (if memory serves, wasn't Mat's battle in FoH with the Shaido leader not shown directly?), but this frequently in the concluding volume? Poor planning.



Actually, I thought his development of Rand's character was fairly good (when I re-read PoD in 2010 in light of his old blog post about PTSD and the "ice" persona he had, my opinion of that book improved greatly), but for many others, I thought he relied too heavily upon repeating prior descriptions. Now I know repetition is utilized in epic romances (this is fresh on my mind after reading La Chanson de Roland and subsequent Roland/Orlando epics in English, French, and Italian in December) to create a familiarity with a character quickly, but I think RJ relied too heavily on 3rd person descriptions of the other character in a scene when he could have used paralanguage/interactive scenes more frequently to develop character ties. But as for the individuality of characters, I did have that problem with a great many of RJ's characters years ago, as the means by which they were described were too similar in a great many cases. Of course, this is more true for some of the secondary and many of the tertiary characters (which I would hope is what I was alluding to whenever I made such a comment, but memory is fallible).



Indeed. Very unconvincing.






I frequently skewer his misuse of prose, more so in posts here than in my reviews (I have other points to cover and try not to write more than 1200 words, including quotes, for most of them), but he truly needs to improve his craft if he wants to keep a large fanbase, as his deficiencies in style, dialogue, and characterization development can lead eventually to readers growing weary of seeing his same few tricks trotted out too frequently. I'm very close to abandoning reading any of his works, even though the majority of them I have received as review copies over the years.