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A review by krichardson
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
2.0
This book makes me understand people who say they don't like fantasy as an entire genre. There was nothing new or interesting that happened in this book. The magic system is boring, the bad guy is just the devil, the societies are unimaginative, and it's heavily laden with morals that sound like they came straight from a Catholic mass down to the often repeated traditional gender roles. I will leave the door open to the possibility that nothing in here feels new because it was the first to do it, but that doesn't change the fact that at this point in time, there's nothing in here that we haven't seen over and over again.
A book like this should be saved by the characters, but there was no one in here that had even a hint of a personality. No one even gets to make decisions because fate does it all for them. Towards the end it is revealed that two characters were ~in love~ when I swear they had barely spoken. I would say that Jordan is bad at writing women (because he is, they were all the same character) but he's not any better at writing men so I will let him off for that.
At the end of the day, I just think this is not a well-written book. The last big issue I will bring up is that there's a lot of telling instead of showing. We will get "big reveals" that the characters tell us "change everything they ever knew" but since it's the first time the reader is hearing anything about it, it fails to elicit any emotion at all from the reader (or maybe just me).
In summary: I found this to be an incredibly boring book.
A book like this should be saved by the characters, but there was no one in here that had even a hint of a personality. No one even gets to make decisions because fate does it all for them. Towards the end it is revealed that two characters were ~in love~ when I swear they had barely spoken. I would say that Jordan is bad at writing women (because he is, they were all the same character) but he's not any better at writing men so I will let him off for that.
At the end of the day, I just think this is not a well-written book. The last big issue I will bring up is that there's a lot of telling instead of showing. We will get "big reveals" that the characters tell us "change everything they ever knew" but since it's the first time the reader is hearing anything about it, it fails to elicit any emotion at all from the reader (or maybe just me).
In summary: I found this to be an incredibly boring book.