Book Review #6 of 2023: The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

Spoilers ahead for the first two books in the Wheel of Time Series

People say that the Wheel of Time is one of the great works of fantasy literature. I can’t say I was convinced by the first installment, Eye of The World. Even after reading this, much better second entry, The Great Hunt, I still am agnostic.

I listened to Eye of the World when I was working as an undergraduate researcher in a plant biology lab at Cornell, and although the audiobook was very long (28 hours or so), nothing much seemed to happen until the final three to four hours of the audiobook, where the titular Eye of the World comes into play, completely out of leftfield. The Great Hunt is much better in this regard, the in universe“Great Hunt” is largely the focus of the novel, although there are some sidequests and splitting up of characters into multiple point of view tracks. This time the story also has some nice character progressions, with Rand slowly growing into and accepting his role as the Dragon Reborn. Nynaeve grew on me as well, as she slowly but surely becoming more of a badass and less of an annoying bitch.

However, I’m still having trouble with some of the fundamental characteristics of the series, and if wasn’t for having to finish the books to discuss them with my friend Alex, I’m not sure I would be able to…