The purpose of this review is to discourage people from starting _The Wheel of Time_. I will argue that it is not worth it, and I think the reasons are compelling. If you want more specific details about this novel's story, please look to other reviews. I will have little to say about _Eye of the World_ specifically.

It was over ten years ago when I started reading _The Wheel of Time_ series, understanding it to be killer top-notch high-fantasy to which I had an unhealthy addiction at the time. I _kinda_ enjoyed it, but I was unwilling to call it an upper-echelon fantasy series. Really self-indulgent prose, excruciatingly slow pacing, embarrassingly unlikeable characters (especially the women), and the unoriginal story (taking from norse mythology and all your usual fantasy tropes) just don't do it for me. How many "small-town young man -- with great hidden power -- prophesied to save the world from Big Evil Dark Lord" stories does a person need anyway?

But whatever. Originality is always less important than plain old good storytelling. But while the first four (maybe five...actually no, it's just four) books are ok, the rest are just terrible (as of this writing, book 12 is the next one to be released). So if your goal is to be entertained, then I cannot see why one should invest the time to starting the series. Just think in terms of numbers -- to date, we're up to about 10,000 pages of WoT, but maybe 3,000 is remotely entertaining, so less than 50% of the series is actually enjoyable. I'm sure you can find something that is mostly good, unlike WoT which is mostly bad. It might seem frivolous talking about a book in this way, but I am trying to quantify it in some way and leaving out specifics about what individuals readers might like. When it comes to my own preferences, I am pretty flexible and forgiving for authors with their fluff and padding, but Jordan is the worst as he wrote SO much about stuff that is COMPLETELY irrelevant. And I am not talking about "irrelevant" in the sense that it is irrelevant when you first read X, but X will be important later in the series. I mean X is just FILLER (I hate the word "filler" because who is to say what is _really_ filler and what is not, but with Jordan it's obvious enough for anyone to figure it out).

A fantasy series should get BETTER as it goes, developing characters and plots and building intensity towards the inevitable conclusion. You should like it so much you almost don't want it to end. With WoT, you BEG for something to happen so that it gets closer to the ending, because most of the author's focus is spent on completely trivial details. I direct you to the amazon reviews for the later books, I have never seen such reader contempt for a novel as I have for garbage like "Winter's Heart" or "Crossroads of Twilight". The worst characteristics of the early books -- which, don't get me wrong, definitely have their charm -- are amplified a hundredfold in later volumes.

I remember a conversation with a friend, where I made a reasonable prediction that Robert Jordan writes so slow, so little happens in his books, the plot goes nowhere after thousands and thousands of pages, that he will be dead before he finishes this series. So after book 10, I said I wouldn't read it anymore until it was finished, because if he dies before it's over, what's the point? A lot of other people on various online communities (such as this one) made similar comments, albeit in more as a jest.

But that is what happened!! Robert Jordan died 2007, RIP.

Now at risk of sounding insensitive, I must confess I laughed out loud when I heard this news. Jordan had arrogantly declared at one point that he would write the WoT until they nailed shut his coffin (google the quote, no joke)-- well that's what happened, so all WoT's defenders over the years who said "it will all be wrapped up awesomely, don't worry, Jordan's fantasy is just especially intricate" just got a big slap in the face. I don't hold it against him for wanting to do what he wanted with a series he obviously loved working on, but as a reader why should someone care about Jordan fastidious attention to meaningless, tedious details that don't matter to someone who cares about the characters and their epic story?

Now Jordan will not be finishing the series, and another writer is going to use his notes and drafts to complete it. On the one hand, this is probably a good thing -- how could anyone make the series worse than Robert Jordan made it with his own later books? But on the other hand, why should anyone who already hasn't started the series bother with it? A series that its own author couldn't care enough to finish properly? Instead, he wasted chapter upon chapter, eventually amounting to thousands of pages, with insignificant characters and plot-lines and ignoring the main characters and plot-lines that the readers actually cared about. (This is not an isolated opinion -- again, check out Amazon reader reviews for later books -- they have the lowest average ratings I've seen for fantasy books with that many [hundreds] reviews.)

so before you commit yourself to this series, do the following: (1) consider if you have something better to read instead (i'm sure you do); (2) look to the future and consider abyss this series goes into and ask yourself if a few hundred pages of entertainment (over the whole series) is worth thousands of pages of complete tedium and poor storytelling in a series that will never have a proper ending because the original author procrastinated and died.

When I hear "epic fantasy", I remember this overblown series and shudder.

This series ruined an entire genre for me. Having started when only three or four of the books had been published, I never dreamed that it would continue so long or that the later books would be so repetitive. They were released far enough apart in time, that I started to forget the subplots. The main plot is easy to remember as it is highly derivative of LOTR.

After investing so much time in a series, one feels compelled to buy the rest, but I am proud to say that my literary tastes graduated from this rubbish and I stopped after nine books.

Unfortunately I am now very wary of picking up anything in the fantasy / sci-fi section, as I no longer regard any of it as literature. Word count and highly descriptive prose does not make good writing. Garbage in, garbage out.

On the plus side, the magic system is well developed and Jordan could write action. But so can a lot of people.

RIP Mr. Jordan.

The Eye of the World is arguably one of the best fantasy novels ever written. Obviously Jordan was inspired by Tolkien, but Tolkien inspired nearly every fantasy writer after him. As well, Jordan's work draws heavily from Asian and Norse themes, so calling him a Tolkien hack is quite wide of the mark.
There is a large amount of low ratings for this book, which I think is unfair, as the majority of the lower ratings say the series disappoints after a time or that it's too long. Personally, I disagree, but also judging this book based on the series isn't fair. The majority of the raters even say that this book deserves 4 or 5 stars, but later volumes make them rate the first one lower.
Other people have rehashed the plot, so I'll skip that. In all, the book is very well done with plenty of characterization, action, suspense, and world building.

I tried, I really did. Someone years ago recommended this series as "better than Tolkein", and since I was on a fantasy kick for a while, I figured I'd give it a go. 800+ dense pages for the first book... I could tackle that. But the book just kept throwing one reason after another to put it away, and after about 500 pages I broke. I'm not made of stone.

Stop me if you've heard this one. A character from some backwater town happens to be the one person in the world who can put a wrench into Evil Overlord's master plans to rule the world by turning the tide in the Great War (of which he currently has no part or knowledge whatsoever). He gets a magic sword from his father, and he and his band of friends (accompanied by all-powerful but mysterious characters) heads out on a mission across the world to take the kids Somewhere Else so the Council of Elders can figure out what to do with them and how to use them to thwart Evil Overlord. Oh yeah, there's wizards and knights and junk too.

Okay, so the story is formulaic. And unfortunately the cardboard cutout characters don't help the situation, especially since Jordan shows no reservations whatsoever about throwing more of them at the story. "We don't have enough bratty women around," he says. "Bring in that girl from the first 10 chapters so we can create more meaningless tension between the characters." The characters grow, I suppose, but not in ways that actually make them better - the quiet and slow-witted kid doesn't gain any kind of personal depth, he just happens to be the one guy in 1000 years with XYZ superpower, so now he's the quiet and slow-witted kid who lifts rocks with his mind. In fact this is the primary way that the plot advances: the entire cast gets into some kind of a bind, and then one of the characters discovers he is the Last of the True Pizza Chefs by unleashing some previously unknown latent ability that saves the day. I didn't stick around long enough to figure out what the deal was with the kid who shouted 1500 year old battle cries but I'm sure it was something similarly absurd (the Old Blood is strong in this one).

Fine. Weak characters, generic plot, that's not bad in itself if the book had been written in a way that made it engaging enough to get through. But here, Jordan's story actually trips over his own writing. Every 50 pages or so he'd pull something so ridiculous that I had to shake my head in disbelief, and spend 50 pages recovering from that only to be hit with something else. Some of the most irritating stuff that I can remember right now:
* Though the tall dark strangers had saved the childrens' lives multiple times, the kids still didn't trust the adults enough to reveal important plot details - their rationale was nothing more than "remember the old stories the elders would tell us in T'Arba'g'arastrongbadiaville?" Show, Jordan, don't tell... you just make your readers think your characters are total morons.
* Awful pacing. One character FINALLY gave readers a reason to care about him JUST as he was marching to near certain death, and he was gone from the story for at least 200 pages, so the emotional impact of losing him was completely diluted (I didn't read far enough to see if he ever came back, but I'm reasonably sure he did, given that Jordan seems to have problems keeping his population in check)
* Inconsistent characters. Whenever they'd stray from their cardboard nature, it was almost always in the wrong direction. The Meddling Kid stole a knife from a ghost bent on killing everyone, and he seriously considered it was a good idea to keep the stupid thing. And nobody else did anything to stop him either.
* One character, in a rush of extreme fear, had a moment where he considered killing his companion before they were slowly tortured to death. This thought process lasts all of 10-15 words. After the danger has passed he spends 2 WHOLE CHAPTERS feeling all bad and guilty and stuff about a moment that was severely underplayed when it happened. I honestly wouldn't have even noticed the original murderous intent if not for all the posturing afterwards.

I finally cracked when he brought readers back from a flashback spanning multiple chapters without giving much of an indication that we were in a flashback at all - except that he wrote the same sequence twice (once at the start of the flashback and once at the end when the flashback caught up with real-time). This caused me to actually think there was a printing error in my copy of the book and the pages had gotten doubled and printed out of order.

Then I realized I was a direct descendant of a long line of Used Bookstore Patrons and exercised my magic powers to trade this one in for store credit.

The Eye of the World is the first book in the Wheel of Time series, by the late Robert Jordan. It's a fantastic world of magic and monsters, that is so detailed, it almost seems real. In this story, Rand and his friends, who are the children of simple folk in a small farming community, suddenly have their lives torn apart as huge monsters called Trollocs rip through their village, burning and killing. None of the villagers have seen these creatures before, and have known them only through stories. A mysterious man and woman arrives, offering to help. Rand soon learns she is an Aes Sedai--a sort of witch--and the man is her Warder--kind of like a guardsman. They tell the kids the monsters were trying to kill them, and that they are very important. They embark on a journey to Tar Valon, the magical home of the Aes Sedai, where they will be safe. But will they arrive in one piece?

I first read this book several years ago. I was very skeptical, because I had heard from others it was similar to The Lord of the Rings, which is one of my favorite books. I expected it to be a copycat story of LOR. But it isn't. It is a fantasy, but it's like no other fantasy story out there. There are so many unique creatures, and the characters are so full and rich, that I would often forget that it's just a story. I recommend this story to everyone who enjoys a good fantasy.