“You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.”

Winter’s Heart is more or less as bland and meandering as its immediate predecessor, The Path of Daggers. Indeed, as bland and meandering as the whole series. It is a perfect example of the way that Robert Jordan has wholeheartedly embraced his struggles with syntax, repetition, and pacing and made them his primary stock-in-trade. At this point, criticizing his shortcomings is futile. The wiser course of action would be to stop subjecting myself to his writing, but my disposition toward finishing what I started makes quitting on a book series feel like a weighty moral issue. I suppose there’s also something of a sunk cost fallacy being committed as well.

Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. Winter’s Heart comprises, approximately, four parts filler to every one part bona fide storytelling. Per the patented Wheel of Time style, those four parts consist of descriptions of clothing, inane mannerisms, and belabored recounting of previous events. The one part is mostly hairbrained subplots that move forward at a snail’s pace. Perrin, Elayne, and Mat (after a one-book absence) are given some mildly interesting–to–laughable quests; but probably the only important thing that occurs concerning the overarching narrative is that Rand al’Thor is bonded as a Warder to the three women in his harem who adore him for no reason whatsoever, and then, along with Nynaeve, cleanses the saidin using magical artifacts. (It remains unclear if Jordan was oblivious to the word’s colloquial usage or if he was just really committed to his kinks, but he really enjoys using the word “taint” in all sorts of ways; e.g. “cleansing the Dark One’s taint,” &c.) Strangely, this very pivotal plot development was treated like an afterthought and feels like it was written by a different author. I mean, how can a man willing to write thousands of pages about bosoms and embroidery in service of fleshing out his world fail to get himself up to write about a world-altering event? Several characters are conspicuously absent, and a quick search tells me that’s because Jordan decided it would be a good idea to tell the same story twice, i.e. the next book in the series, Crossroads Twilight takes place somewhat concurrently with this one. Why he felt the need to stretch the story arc across two books, when the past three books could have been condensed into one, is baffling, even if it is evidence of a consistent philosophy (more books = more dollars).