Problems I had with Book 7, Crown of Swords

[wavemistresstrammell]

jsut getting to the chapter where cadsuane is introduced....i wanna see what you guys are talkin about....its been so long since i've read this series...prolly before winters heart came out...alot of it i've forgotten, i'm remembering why i love the series though :D

 

so far i'm flying though aCoS though....its been a much faster read than LoC so far

Did you not like LoC? Just curious ^.^

[Mr Ares]

The difference is the journey along the way in each of those books was interesting and enjoyable. They were exciting and showed me new cultures and new people I actually cared about. The journey in book seven is slow and boring and the payoff was even worse (I finished the book again last night).

So your problem is not that Rand does little compared to other books, but that what he does is less interesting to you. Well, Rand's storyline is more focused on politics than on adventure in the later books.

 

Also, in each other book Rand had clear goals he was trying to accomplish. Book seven has nothing to do with Rand fighting Sammael. At all.

That's just not ture at all. He tries to get Perrin to lead the army he has to attack Illian (previously Mat was leading it). The army begins marching for Illian. Admittedly not much happens in this plotline in the intervening nine days, before Rand launches his attack, but he did set his diversionary assualt in progress earlier in the book. Most of the book takes place while he is waiting for his army to get from point a to point b.

 

I don't want to see my hero win all the time, but then Rand doesn't do that.

He doesn't lose very often. And it makes it more interesting if he does lose battles from time to time, even if we know he'll win the war.

 

For all of book seven they've ignored that plot, but then all of a sudden at the end RJ sort of tosses it in.

Sammael pounced on Rand's army, that was marching to Illian as a diversion, and Rand responded by attacking Sammael's capital. So Sammael acted in response to Rand's actions near the start of the book.

 

The fights between Ishamael and Rand were much better IMO.

Yes, they were.

 

There are simply too many point of view characters by this point. When you can tell a 1,000 page installment and only touch a third of your PoV characters that's going to bother some of your readers.

I don't think there are too many povs. As for absence of many pov characters, that's one thing a lot of people dislike about Malazan Book of the Fallen. It's not something I have a problem with. If anything, Malazan is wrose in this regard, spreading its storylines over multiple continents, many not even touched on for books at a time, with far more povs than RJ. Only a few of the characters from book 1 are in book 2, and book 5 has an almost completely new cast list. If it's a problem for you, don't read Malazan.

[Monetherian]

The ending of A Crown Of Swords was in my opinion actually worse then the rest of the book which in itself was the blandest book up to that point in the series, as a whole it was way to dragged out and just daft.

 

Now to the "ending" the fight between Sammael and Rand. It was just pitiful and totally unbelievable. All of a sudden the *fool does nothing about the wards in Shadar Logoth then he goes and kills Lian the maiden of the spear which he left for dead.

 

He doesn't just kill her to save her from being killed horribly by Mashadar with say a ball of fire or something more "humane", no he uses Balefire to kill her which doesn't only kill her but erases her from the pattern making it impossible for her to be reborn in any other turning of the wheel.

 

How in the ever buggering.. How the fool can reconcile that with his namby pamby double standards about women and what not I just can not understand..

 

* Rand al'Thor.

 

PS.

 

Book seven disgusted me more then any two others in the series combined.

[Sabio]

FYI RJ has said balefore doesn't destroy your soul forever, those killed by balefore will be reborn again.  Think of it as a fail safe to prevent soneone from balefiring everyone and ruining the pattern forever.

 

2. What exactly was Rand suppose to do about the wards Samm placed?

[solarz]

I think it was the 13th Depository where I read this. I claim none of this as an original idea. But the series seems to be structured as a series of thematic trilogies. The first three books are about Rand coming to terms with being the Dragon Reborn and accepting his fate. These books are probably more closely linked anyways, since Jordan originally planned the events covered by them to make up the first book of the series. The second trilogy, which ends with LoC, is about the world coming to terms with Rand being the Dragon.  The rest of the series, up to KoD, cannot be so easily grouped. So ACoS is the first book that doesn't have a thematic element connect it to the others in the series.

 

This makes a lot of sense, and I believe ACOS actually continues that theme. Winter's Heart is the 9th book, remember what happens at the end of that? :)

 

This also explains why Jordan said AMOL would wrap up the series, even if "Tor has to invent a new binding system, or it comes with its own library cart".