Book Review: The Great Hunt
Author: Robert Jordan
Series: Wheel of Time #2
Genre: Fantasy, Adult Fiction
Format: Audiobook
Length: 26 hours and 8 minutes
Synopsis excluded for potential spoilers of previous books.
My Review:
The great hunt was… not so great.
I think I know what it is about Jordan’s books that don’t work for me. There’s usually an interesting beginning that gets me curious enough to keep reading and an ending that’s quite exciting BUT leaves me hanging because it’s over too soon. While his middle chapters tend to alternate between action and lulls, he has a tendency to get very wordy which causes me to zone out.
Jordan’s characters also haven’t changed much from the first book and I’m having a hard time with this because his books are already quite massive. His female characters are headstrong, dominating women who stereotype his male characters as being ‘wool-headed’. There’s too much stereotyping that make the characters feel very two-dimensional, as if all women must be a certain way and all men another. I get that this series is 14 books long and I’m trying to come to terms with its pacing, but boy is it hard. This series is also brimming with new characters that all seem significant somehow and it’s harder to keep track of them when many lack distinguishing personality traits. To add to that, the characters keep repeating one line over and over and over to justify everything that happens. Or maybe to remind the reader, just in case it hasn’t stuck.
The Great Hunt isn’t that much better than The Eye of the World but I did like it more if only for the part involving secondary female characters banding together and helping each other. So an extra .5 star for that. At this point I think my stubbornness will be the only thing that keeps me reading. I really want Jordan to prove me wrong and show me I’m just being impatient, that this is common with 14-book series, and the further I get the higher my ratings will become. Third time’s the charm, I hope.
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