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The Shadow Rising | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Robert Jordan | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Wheel of Time | The World of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, New Spring, The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, A Crown of Thorns, The Path of Daggers, Winter's Heart, Crossroads of Twilight, Knife of Dreams | ||
Here is where things start to get complicated. In all the previous books, the various characters split up, sometimes early, and their various plot threads wind their way through the world on their own seperate paths, but they end up at the same place for the climax. But that's no longer true, here.
There's also more threads than there ever were before. There's the thread that follows Perrin and Faile as they return to the Two Rivers, which is having some problems with an army of fanatical Whitecloaks. There's the thread following Min as she returns to the White Tower, to tell the Amyrlyn Seat about events surrounding Rand. And, although they stay together, Egwene, Rand, and Mat have their own seperate paths to follow as they visit Rhuidean in the Aiel Waste.
The book is also different from the previous two in another major way. In those, it was all maneuvering around, with small things happening, until the climax. Here, though, there is much more action going on in the middle, most of it having to do with Perrin's storyline. There's a lot elsewhere, though. Strangely, the climax seems paltry, perhaps because with the stuff in the middle heightening the action level there's less of a peak at the end. It's still a good climax, but I liked the others a bit better.
It's not as tense as the first book, by any means, but it is a sight better than the last two. In addition, you find out a lot of useful information about the Aiel, both current and historical. Lastly, by the end of this book, you'll know pretty much everything you need to know about the setting, and the "helper" book that starts this list will provide few spoilers. About the most it'd tell you at this point would be how Rand takes care of a few specific Forsaken, the evil super-mages left over from the last war.
This is a critical volume in a lot of respects, but then, so are most of them. Not a book to miss, in this series, by any means.
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