Crossroads of Twilight: Book Ten of 'The Wheel of Time' (Wheel of Time (Tor Paperback)) [Mass Market Paperback]

This book has been long awaited by anyone who's read the last nine, something Jordan must be aware of. Even the most diehard fans (and I'm one of them) must be wanting Jordan to get on with it, to advance the plot a little. This book doesn't do that. There are sections dealing with Perrin, Mat, Egwene, Elayne and (briefly) Rand himself, but none of them really take the story anywhere. Perrin starts out on a search & rescue mission for Faile and by the end of the book he's still on a search & rescue mission for Faile, Mat is trying to leave Seanchan territory and still is at the end of the book, the siege of Tar Valon and the choosing of the Queen of Andor go precisely nowhere and Rand does nothing of significance. 680 pages and hardly anything happens.

To be fair, it does seem, in all the above cases, as if something is about to happen (in fact the Egwene and Mat storylines do have significant events happen right at the end, but even these just set up a situation for the next volume to deal with), so volume 11 may well have a lot of action in it. But I would have liked some here, I've been waiting over a year after all. Even if it meant the book being longer, I don't mind 1100 page novels, in fact I quite like them.

And this is more disappointing because the prologue, which I downloaded from Kazaa a few months back (can you believe that Jordan got upset because people like me refused to pay twice for the same piece of writing?) did have lots of tantalising hints of action. It seemed that a counterattack was going to be launched on the Seanchan and the Black Tower was going to be split. But none of these promising plotlines come to fruition. The possible split in the Black tower is mentioned once and the counterattack on the Seanchan not at all.

Like most people who've read the other nine I can't see any way to stop now, I've invested too much in it. And there is some interesting character development and some slight movement on some sub plots. However for £18 and a wait of nearly 2 years I had expected more. But, like Nick Hornby and Arsenal in the seventies, I'm stuck with what's dished out to me and can see no way out of it.

Jordan has said that he hopes to finish by volume 12, something I can't see happening given how little happened here. But I still hope he'll recover his earlier style, the interesting and excellent books that drew me into this series. Hopefully he will recover and start to write decently again. A bit like Arsenal in the 80s.

There is no doubt in my mind that this book was written with one key thought in mind -to make the series drag on as long as possible in order to make as much money as possible! The only way to describe this book is 'longwinded' -it could easily have been compressed down to half it's length without loosing anyting. Let me illustrate with an example. At one point in the book an Aes Sedi arrives at the 'rebel' Aes Sedi camp with important news, news that us as a reader are keen to find out. Now in order to find out about this news we are forced to read through 2/3 pages of pointless detail, such as a detailed description of crossing the camp (mud underfoot, novices jumping out the way etc -which I might add had already been described a couple of times before!) this is followed by a page describing the exact order by which sub-sub-characters filed into the room. When we finally get to find out the news it's rushed through with little detail and you're left thinking 'what a let down!'. Unfortunately this kind of thing is repeated all too often thought the book.

Overall, this book does resolve a few questions/themes but most are only advanced slightly.

To conclude -I would definately not recommend this book to anyone who is not an avid fan of the series and even then I would suggest you wait until the next book is available, then read this as a prelude. The only reason I give this two stars is that it does bring the whole story forward, albeit one tiny laborious step, but a step nonetheless.