“He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone.”

The wheel weaves as the wheel wills, and despite two decades elapsing between the first book and the last, an increasingly sprawling and unfocused narrative, and the death of the author, the wheel seemingly willed that the Wheel of Time series finally came to a close. Or maybe it was just that Tor didn’t want to leave money on the table, who knows?

Given the impossible task of wrapping up Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy saga, Brandon Sanderson takes a checkbox approach as he tries to conclude dozens of subplots within the span of a single—albeit predictably gargantuan—novel that finally delivers the legendary confrontation between the Rand and the Dark One that the series had been building up to for thousands and thousands of pages. Unfortunately, that encounter, spread out across the entire novel by a time-dilation trick, doesn’t live up to expectations. (Actually, on second thought, my expectations were exceedingly low, so maybe it does.)

If the previous books occasionally felt like extended Wikipedia summaries bogged down by Jordan’s penchant for excessive description and inconsequential backstory, then A Memory of Light is marked by its relative briskness and perfunctory texture. Sanderson moves through the necessary story beats quickly (as quick as he can while also maintaining Jordan’s characteristic bloat; the trade paperback weighs in at over 1000 pages), tying up loose ends with workmanlike commitment, but doing so without much enthusiasm or elegance or attention to theme. As a result, A Memory of Light totally fails to achieve the transcendent high points that one might expect from the culminating volume in an epic fantasy series.