I have not been secretive about the fact that I am finishing the Wheel of Time books mostly out of spite. Okay, entirely out of spite. While it would be a huge exaggeration to claim that I haven’t enjoyed a single minute of this series, I have enjoyed a much lower percentage of minutes than I would generally be willing to put up with from my reading, particularly something of this massive scope.

According to my Kindle, I’m about 45 minutes of reading from the end of The Gathering Storm, the first book co-authored by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan’s death and the twelfth book in the series, or the thirteenth if you count the prologue book.

And I’m … enjoying it? Quite a lot, actually? Which has made me really curious about what the general reception of the Sanderson books was from the broader Jordan fanbase, a group I don’t really consider myself a part of. Now, it’s probably worth pointing out that Sanderson wasn’t hired to write these books, he was hired to finish them, which is a subtly different beast; his job was never anything other than to bring the story to a close and so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s going after dangling plot threads with a broadax and shoving the whole thing forward as fast as he can– which, as it turns out, was still three books and probably 2500 pages at least. But it’s kind of fascinating to me that when you actually have things happen in these books, they’re pretty good! Sanderson has done a good enough job of mimicking Jordan’s style, including his weird ideas about gender and his creepy spanking fetish, that I don’t think I would ever have realized that Jordan was no longer writing the books were someone else’s name not on the cover. And it’s probably worth pointing out that on a sentence-to-sentence level, I have no idea how much Jordan actually wrote; for all I know, Sanderson’s role, especially on this first book, was more of an assembler and an editor than an actual co-writer. I assume his contribution grows as his trilogy continues.

But damn. There’s a bit midway through Storm where (spoiler alert for something you’ll never remember reading about if you haven’t read the books yet) Rand gets an a’dam put on him by one of the Forsaken. Had Jordan been writing, he would have been stuck in that fucking thing for three more books. Sanderson wraps up the whole thing in like five pages. I genuinely rolled my eyes and set my Kindle down for a minute when it happened, unwilling to believe what I had just read and extremely disinterested in reading Rand having even more reasons to be miserable for, surely, at least the rest of this book and most of the next one. But no! Five pages. Almost like it didn’t even happen. And then he kills the fuck out of Semirhage and another one of the Forsaken? In the same book? The same book that mentions all of the core characters except for Elayne, and moves everyone’s stories forward? Is that even legal?

Turns out it is. I’m not going to go straight into the next book when I finish this one; I need a hell of a palate-cleanser after my last two books being over two thousand pages long, so I’m going to read a bunch of short stuff for a while, but I probably won’t wait until the end of the month to pick up the next one.