Many reviews have already been written about The Gathering Storm. Some reviews are glowing, some are lukewarm, all seem to be mostly concerned with how Brandon Sanderson did filling in for Robert Jordan. While I am pretty sure that if I got right down to it I could probably dissect out what parts Jordan had already written, what parts he left notes and outlines, and what parts Sanderson created from scratch, none of that was foremost on my mind when I was reading the book mostly because it really doesn’t matter to me. When Sanderson was named to be the author to continue the Wheel of Time series I did my homework and read the books he had already published; Elantris, the Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker. He is, hands-down, an outstanding writer and possibly one of the best world builders in fiction past or present. I long ago came to the conclusion that Brandon Sanderson is a writer with the ability and the attitude to write the ending to the Wheel of Time and give it the consideration and the credit it deserves even to the point of asking that Robert Jordan’s signature be printed on the title page of each book because he didn’t feel right signing a book without it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is true class.

So, putting aside the question of Sanderson’s ‘voice’, what about the story of The Gathering Storm itself? In short, I found The Gathering Storm to be the darkest and most emotional of all of the Wheel of Time books. Several events of the book resolve major plot arcs and will leave any dedicated Wheel of Time reader grinning from ear to ear. However, one of the criticisms of the Wheel of Time is that most of the main characters as twenty-somethings, shouldn’t have the experience or couldn’t have the ability to do the things that they do as they match themselves against, in some cases, people who have literally hundreds of years of experience. In The Gathering Storm the answer to this criticism reveals itself as at least one of the main characters is being crushed under the weight and strain of that duty. What this does for the story is to temper the emotional highs for the victories of some with a sense of profound sadness for the emotional agony of others. This isn’t the book that will define the series, that book is no doubt two books away, but for the reader of the Wheel of Time this is the book where everything in the plot up until now comes to the point that it cannot become any worse and finally, coming to a Garden of Gethsemane moment, strips away everything until there is only one thing left; hope.

Everything seems to be falling apart. Nothing seems to be positioned in the right place to withstand the coming Last Battle. Nobody seems to have a correct and comprehensive picture of the situation. Yet, if the reader takes a step back from the details, the foreshadowing and all of the expectations and assumptions to look at all of the events of the story in context, there are clues that point toward these apparent flaws and reveal them to be anything but. For example, the pattern itself seems to be unraveling to the point that rooms and hallways inside buildings are physically rearranging themselves. This seems to serve nothing but chaos, and may even be evidence of the Dark One touching the pattern, yet, if it were not for one of those seemingly random shifts one of the pivotal and climactic moments of The Gathering Storm would have occurred in a much different and probably disastrous manner. Taking that into account what purpose may be served, for example, by the Borderland army that is far, far away from the Blight, or by a half dozen other elements that seems to be wildly out-of-place.

With that in mind, The Gathering Storm is a less a great book in itself (though it is), but more of a promise that the greatest parts of the epic Wheel of Time story are yet to come. For that, The Gathering Storm and the rest of the Wheel of Time books are well worth the read.