A word to the wise, if you have yet to begin reading the Wheel of Time series, please don’t start now. I first started reading the series over fifteen years ago. The Gathering Storm is the twelfth book in the series and the first to be written by Brandon Sanderson following the death of the original author who wrote under the pen name Robert Jordan. The thirteenth book, Towers of Midnight, has recently been released but I’m waiting for the paperback edition. The current plan is that there will be one last book after this to finish the series.

The sheer volume of text alone certainly qualifies the series as being epic. While it’s a tragedy that Jordan died before he managed to complete his tale, there’s no faulting him for not trying his darnest, turning new manuscripts in like clockwork. Unfortunately, the prose is pretty uneven in quality. Some of the last few books that Jordan wrote himself were so forgettable that I actually bought one of them twice because I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d already read it! This is because the books were so full of foreshadowing and plotting that hardly anything of note actually happened and the story barely advanced at all.

Even at its best the Wheel of Time series is no Lord of the Rings or even Song of Ice and Fire. It’s pretty juvenile action adventure fare but when the action starts going, it can be very, very good. If you ever felt frustrated about how mages in fantasy stories never seem to show the full extent of their fantastical powers in large-scale battles, this is the series for you. The Battle of Dumai’s Wells described in book five, Lord of Chaos, has become a classic of the genre. It features a small strike force of trained mages teleporting into the middle of a pitched battle to save their leader and work together to erect a forcefield to keep out over a hundred thousand enemy troops. Then once their leader has been secured, they turn the forcefield outwards to literally chop up the mass of soldiers like a meatgrinder.

I’d wondered for a while if I’d finish the series after Jordan died but I finally decided I was in so deep I might as well stick around for the end. After reading The Gathering Storm, I’m glad I did. The book nicely resolves a number of important plot points. You can tell that Sanderson is in a hurry to get things wrapped up within a reasonable number of pages but it is gratifying to see key events that everyone has been anticipating for ages now finally take place. This includes Egwene’s confirmation as the Amyrlin by all the Aes Sedai and at long last, Rand’s reconciliation with the voice of Lews Therin Telamon inside his head.

Some developments take place so fast it almost leaves my head spinning. The fearsome Forsaken are almost a joke now. One escapes, threatens Rand and is summarily dealt with within a couple of chapters. The Aes Sedai has been hunting the Black Ajah for several books now and completely out of the blue Egwene receives vital information from an unexpected source that sends the whole lot of them packing. It’s also cool to see that Sanderson has read the previous books very carefully to tie up loose ends and bring back characters, like Hurin, from a while back.

The most amusing part of the book however is how straightforwardly he deals with the criticisms of Jordan’s writing. Fans have long noted Jordan’s overuse of the same descriptive mannerisms over and over again, particularly when it comes to women. His books are filled with pages and pages of women smoothing their skirts and tugging their braids when they’re under stress. Early in this book, Sanderson has Nynaeve, one of the characters most prone to this sort of thing, start tugging her braid only to abruptly stop and berate herself for being childish. Then we never see any braid-tugging again for the rest of the book. It’s a neat nod to Jordan that also serves to announce that there won’t be any more of this sort of thing.

So yes, The Gathering Storm is a good chapter in the Wheel of Time series and I daresay that Sanderson will do a better job at bringing it to an end than Jordan himself ever could. I still wouldn’t recommend it to new readers because you need to wade through a ton of junk to get here, but I’m now confident that existing fans will be able to get the closure they need.