I guess there's no accounting for tastes. I found those sections pretty underwhelming. There was no real sense of danger, horror or tension - it was more like going from A to B to C chopping Shadowspawn down along the way, the descriptions were very bland, lacking any sense of epic, and failed to take you sensually in the inferno of those streets. Sanderson also made a bad job of conveying the horror of a city and its people torn apart by Shadowspawn.

The sequence is also plagued a bit by various incongruities, characters hearing this or that clearly, from calls to horns to Shadowspawn on the corner, when what went on in the city was realistically a deafening roar. The cityscape wasn't respected in a few places, for instance the events on the way to and around the palace (Brandon have Talmanes able to judge the situation from way too far. He couldn't possibly do that in the Inner City, all the way up to the Queen's plaza in front of the palace's gates - where Guybon would have been fighting, but it's not how it's described - it's a nightmarish maze of very narrow streets winding up the hill, and that part of the city is all made up of tall ogier-made buildings with towers and spires, Tar Valon style). Fighting against Shadowspawn already entrenched in the Inner City an assaulting the palace would be simply hellish, but Brandon made poor use of that location.

I expected a gruesome episode, a small army making its way in a city where tens of thousands were dying horribly, where fire was everywhere. Instead we got soldiers going ahead steadfastly, fighting a bit along the way, getting wounds, and we barely got to see the survivors or fallen Caemlyners through Talmanes's eyes - old folk, women and children among them - more often than not it was restricted to telling us blandly thousands were packed here or there. As I could see on various discussions, Brandon didn't do his job too well either at helping us picture things.. people are very confused about how much of the Band Talmanes brought (he sure didn't seem to have 10,000, which is what Elayne left behind - and yet according to vague descriptions that's exactly what he had "The Band", aka his whole half of it, ie: 10,000 men, but later on he has 500 men with him and the rest at the southern Gate) or how huge the Shadowspawn invasion really was (the usual Brandon "vagueness".

Even accounting for the fact Talmanes isn't really emotional and this was his POV, you would really have to be cold as ice for a commander and his soldiers not to react more viscerally at a human level to the sheer horror of the situation. Instead people seem to have time and thought for petty matters like grimacing when a lord refer to citizens as "peasants".

The whole sequence pretty much failed to elicit any strong emotion, and considering this depicted the destruction of one of the earliest and consistantly most important location and culture of the series, I'd call that pretty much a failure on Brandon's part.

Jordan also had his flaws, but with this sequence we're far behind in thrills from what we got from RJ with Dumai's Wells or even the Battle of Malden, which for all its abruptness and its focuss on Perrin only conveyed a very good sense of the chaos of battle.

There's probably more to come (opinions are very divided if the last portion was Talmanes' death or not. I had the impression it wasn't, that he would wake up among his rescuers in a future chapter), though it won't be Mat (who we know appears for the first time in the book in chapter 11, already in Ebou Dar).

For the moment there's a lot of unanswered questions, for instance where are the fairly big Aes Sedai group from the Silver Swan, and where are the even larger group of Tower envoys with Myrelle that camp outside the Black Tower with 47 sisters, a ton of warders and a contingent of Tower Guards (and they are merely four leagues south of the city, and we know the dreamspike do not extend beyond the walls as Nynaeve travelled in and out of that camp to get Lan's bond) and that couldn't possibly miss the city burning in the night! Of course with Brandon at the helm we can never be sure what happens when, though there seems to be a consensus that events at the Black Tower are taking place a substantial amount of time prior to the attack on Caemlyn while the Egeanin scenes, the Talmanes scenes and the Aviendha scenes were all taking place on the same night (meaning we have no idea if Myrelle and co are still camped outside when the battle rages in Caemlyn. Probably not, as it would be baffling they didn't Travel away to raise the alarm by now. Most likely if they are there, Taim has seen to it that they couldn't possibly leave to raise the alarm, one way or another.).