Third read: 06/02/21 - 08/02/21

Rating: (obviously still) 5 stars

WEEEEEEEEEE!! Who loves impulsively rereading favourite books when I have way to many new ones to read that are due back at the library any day now?? MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!



Second read: 01/08/20 - 08/08/20

Rating: (still) 5 stars

Man, I love The Great Hunt. It's one of my favourites in the whole series (which is uncommon, I know). In this reread, one of the things that stood out to me was how much the Seanchan suck. I already knew that, but being introduced to them again made me hate them even more. I don't really know what else to say that I didn't say in my first review, so I'll just leave it at that.


First read: 03/03/20 - 19/03/20

Rating: 5 stars

If that I forcefully kept myself awake an entire night to finish The Great Hunt isn't a testament to how good this book is, then I don't know what would be. Following the trend I have experienced from the first two books, if The Wheel of Time is going to keep improving like this, it is extremely possible that it will end up with a permanent spot on my favourites list.

Being a lover of both classic and modern fantasy, The Wheel of Time encapsulates the perfect middle ground for me, pulling from the best parts of each time period in the genre and discarding the downfalls both have. While the meandering, elongated style J.R.R. Tolkien was so famous for is fantastic in its own right, you can't deny that descriptions of trees and plants can get a bit repetitive, and quite boring. But if you are willing to look past the paragraphs of explaining how trees are majestically blowing in the wind, you get the most amazing stories with intricate worlds and plots. Robert Jordan takes the layer aspect of classic fantasy (with admittedly some instances of the former), and pairs it with the creativity and innovation modern fantasy does so well. (Coincidentally, as irony would have it, this paragraph is a rambling mess. Go figure.)

Because The Wheel of Time is so long, the hero's journey is streeeeeeetched out to fit over 14 books. Being a huge classical studies nerd, I have done my fair share of examining the character journeys of ancient heroes, such as Perseus, as well as more modern protagonists like Luke Skywalker, using Joseph Campbell's Monomyth from The Hero With a Thousand Faces known as the "hero's journey". In terms of The Wheel of Time with Rand being the hero in question, the first stage of the journey (the "call to adventure") does not even start really until the very end of The Eye of the World, where Moiraine tells him he is the Dragon and must save the world (arguably it could have occurred when the Trollocs and Myrddraal attacked Emond's Field, but I digress). Usually, the call happens in the same scene as the second stage, called the "refusal of the call", but Jordan doesn't even go into stage two in the same book as stage one! It's like it's going to be one stage per book (which doesn't even work because The Wheel of Time is 14 books long and there are only 12 stages of the hero's journey)! I don't know, I read too much into everything anyway, and the rest of the series may divulge from the Monomyth entirely.

Robert Jordan does well introducing multiple POVs gradually without dumping huge amounts on top of the reader. While I personally would not mind if we started out with like 30 POV characters, I can understand why that could be definitely overwhelming. Instead, as you go through The Wheel of Time, you meet characters from other points of view first, and later they (sometimes) become a POV character themselves. (Because I am incredibly over prepared for absolutely everything, I have an entire list of all the points of view for all books in The Wheel of Time, and know percentage wise what the series looks like.)

In The Eye of the World, I was really annoyed with Elayne's character, but in that book we only saw her through her first interaction with Rand. In The Great Hunt, we see her at Tar Valon with Min, Egwene and Nynaeve, and even in the first scene she appeared in, I instantly liked her more than I had during all of book one. She did get frustrating at times, when she was infatuated with Rand for some reason. One example that really stood out to me (no spoilers) was when Egwene started to kill someone, before stopping herself, after she had been through immense physical and emotional trauma. While Nynaeve was comforting Egwene, all Elayne could say was, "Rand would kill someone who did a thing like that," Like who cares what Rand would do! Egwene had gone through something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy (Nynaeve even says she would not wish it on even the freaking Dark One) and all you can think about was what Rand would do in this situation?! Talk about insensitive.

From the little snippet of Min we saw in The Eye of the World, I knew she was going to become a favourite, and in The Great Hunt that suspicion was most definitely confirmed. I know the girl who doesn't wear dresses and rarely any jewellery isn't everyone's cup of tea, but that caricature is so alike to my own personality that every time I see a character like that I am instantly hooked into the story all the more (my favourite examples that I can think of are Annabeth Chase and Vin Venture). While I respect other more feminine characters, and I am in no way saying that one has to disregard their femininity to be perceived as strong, but because of who I am, I don't connect with them as much.

The last approximately 20% was really the best part of the entire book. The middle got a little dry, but by chapter 39 - 40, the action really amped up and an aspect was added into the mix which I really, really liked.

So yeah. The Great Hunt was amazing and incredible and I don't have a thesaurus nearby so that is all the adjectives you are getting.