The thirteenth book of the Extruded Fantasy Product that is The Wheel of Time, and the second written by premier Extruded Fantasy Producer Sanderson after Jordan’s death. This is the end-game of the series – and has been for several books – and there’s still one more humungous tome to go.

Rand al’Thor has finally grown up (it’s only taken him twelve books), and proves that when he puts his mind to it he has, well, super-powers. But he doesn’t use them to defeat the bad guys because that would end the story real quick. Meanwhile, Egwene is trying to get the Aes Sedai behind her, but someone is murdering sisters in the White Tower, so Egwene arranges an ambush in Tel’aran’rhiod, the dream world. Perrin Aybara finally accepts what people have been telling him for around seven or eight books, that he’s not just a blacksmith out of his depth but the actual leader of an actual army – oh, and he turns out he’s even more powerful in Tel’aran’rhiod than Egwene because of all the wolf dream stuff. Mat Cauthon still eyes up every woman he meets and tries to work out which of his friends he should introduce them to, but he also rescues Moiraine (remember her?) from the Aelfinn/Eelfinn (one of the genuinely dramatic bits of the novel, to be fair). Oh, and he invents cannons, as well. Elayne is, well, Elayne spends the novel being pregnant and being a queen. And there’s some weirdness going on at the Black Tower, with an increase in toxic masculine behaviour (!), and something preventing those there from Travelling out (gosh, not an obvious piece of foreshadowing at all).

There’s a few other bits and pieces going on, and a handful of sections from the POVs of supporting characters – but it still feels like there’s a lot of verbiage for very little actual progress. By the end of Towers of Midnight (2010, USA), the good guys have a gigantic army gathered at the field of Merrilor, which I think puts them in place for the Last Battle… Incidentally, I don’t recall any actual towers of actual midnight being mentioned in the novel, other than in the glossary (which places them on the Seanchen continent – er, what?).

On the plus side, Nynaeve loses her braid, so there’s no more pulling of it (although it doesn’t stop Sanderson from repeatedly mentioning she wants to pull it). Sanderson clearly doesn’t have Jordan’s fascination with spanking, but every female character is introduced with a description of her breasts. There are also lots of descriptions of clothes, mostly female. The prose reads like it was dictated (which is how I believe Sanderson “writes”), the sort of narrative scramble created by someone who puts things down as they think of them. There must have been some planning, of course, given the vast cast (ugh) of the series and the even vaster wordage, but was that Sanderson or Jordan?

Sanderson doesn’t appear to know what a chapter is. There are 57 in this novel. Each one contains sections from the POVs of the different lead – and supporting – characters. The chronology is more or less linear, but there’s no structure or logic to which narrative thread follows which – sometimes, several sections follow one POV, other times it flips between several in a single chapter. It’s not as if the chapters were all the same length, either. I couldn’t work out what in story terms signalled the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.

There’s only one more book to go: A Memory of Light (2013, USA). There’s a lot of heavy lifting needed to finish off the story – which no doubt explains its 350,000+ words.

We shall see how that goes.