“Anyone who claimed that old age had brought them patience was either lying or senile.”

Any reader considering The Gathering Storm likely knows its backstory. After writing eleven books (plus one prequel) of diminishing quality in the Wheel of Time series, Robert Jordan was diagnosed with a terminal illness, ultimately passing away with his epic fantasy still incomplete. He had intended to finish out the saga with one gargantuan volume, however, when his widow-editor Harriet McDougal selected Brandon Sanderson to complete his outline, the pinch hitter quickly realized that the remaining story was far too large to fit into a single book. The Gathering Storm is the first of three novels co-written by Sanderson that bring the Wheel of Time series to a close.

By this point in the series Jordan had dug himself into such a peculiar hole that Sanderson finds himself faced with a nigh impossible task: righting wrongs without calling further attention to them. That he mostly fails to accomplish this feat is not really his fault, of course, as it’s essentially impossible to witness forward plot momentum, character development, resurrection of long-abandoned story threads, abandonment of long-stale side trails, and so on, without realizing afresh that none of these things happened in the last several thousand pages that Jordan wrote. So while the story, which concerns Rand’s fraying sanity and his preparations for the Last Battle, Egwene’s attempt to unify the White Tower and expose the Black Ajah, as well as the general decay of the world, is in the hands of a marginally better storyteller, the minor improvements can’t but open old wounds.

Regarding style, in the preface Sanderson suggests that he’s like a different director working from the same script with the same actors. He doesn’t try to copy Jordan’s syntax, but he does retain many of his annoying traits (redundant descriptions, overwrought backstories, pointless squabbling) and introduces a few of his own (most notably, there were needless italics on almost every page).

Though Sanderson is certainly a better writer than Jordan was in his later years, The Gathering Storm, like the brief flashes of inspiration in the preceding volumes, ultimately elicits little more than a profound sense of regret over what might have been.