Just finished reading it, after rereading the entire series myself. Oh god, what a slightly disconcerting mess. First, obviously not Brandon Sanderson's fault that he can't write like RJ, which was not necessarily brilliant but was what we had gotten to know and love. He readily admits that he's not trying to. But the character developments were mildly satisfying at best, with (to my very recent memory) the only passage that I thought was notably gripping being the scene where Rand seizes the True Power. The plot developments were obviously satisfying, but could only make up for so much. The treatment of the less major characters was, frankly, careless, as he totally changed the way that, for example, Talmanes and Verin and Gawyn talked and... flowed. If I hadn't spent months rereading the series, I would have thrown down the book after reading Semirhage's 'breaking' scene. I almost did regardless. Utterly embarrassing and reckless of BS to suggest that either her or Cadsuane's entire platform of intimidating legend is built on a paper-thin foundation of self-esteem that can be broken in a 2-minute spanking. Barf.

In short, I'm glad they're finishing the series. It'll be nice to get those questions answered. BS did a great job of solidly advancing and dealing with plot lines, and I like the way the perspectives in the book were put together to get 2 major lines solved and to advance others enough to spice things up. But it felt like it was written for children, and it's hard to read after going through all the rest. Given a choice between the abominable first 150 pages of PoD where we get to see Sea Folk and Kin bickering, Elayne complaining, and 2 embarrassingly forced excuses for Elayne and Aviendha to affirm that they should be sisters 4eva, written by RJ, and the entire book of TGS written by BS with all of it's major developments, I'd be hard-pressed to decide which one I'd prefer to read.

my $0.02

Zaph