#I thought I could stick it out for when BranSan comes in to finish it but I could NOT stomach the thought of 7-8000 more pages of this

[kbookblurbs]

The Eye of the World - Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time #1)

2.5/5 - Characters were indistinct, very very slow plot, weird romance subplots

I went into this novel with high expectations, as I've heard it lauded as one of The high fantasy novels to read, and was summarily let down. The writing isn't bad, per se, but it's not anything revolutionary. The plot is also very reminiscent of LotR, but I can usually put that aside if the other elements of the story are interesting enough. Obviously, that was not the case here.

There are three teenage boys who function as main characters and they all fall into archetypes of characters more than acting as true characters. They can all be summed up in one or two words or traits, which, in my estimation, is not a very well written character.

The plot was really what let me down. It takes a while for this book to find the plot, as in more than 100 pages of reading, and once it does, it's more of a slow jog than anything else. We're moving, technically, but so slow that if anything, it drags more here than it did in the first 150 pages. It's 400 pages of running from something. Where the Fellowship of the Ring, for example, has moments of rest and reprieve for the characters, this book has flashes of "rest" before running again. A side character, with whom we'd spent probably a cumulative 350 pages with, died and I wasn't even sad.

The method of storytelling for one of the storylines was also just ... odd. In a better written book, I might use interesting instead of odd, but here, odd is what fits. You start a chapter at a certain point, jump back to recap every part of the past two-three days prior, then jump ahead ANOTHER two-four days at which point the interlude is narrated again. It's exhausting and irritating as a reader.

More than anything, it's also super predictable. You can tell what's going to happen from the first 150 pages. I was just incredibly disappointed, from start to finish.