The series really went to shit around Book 8, and nothing since then has really redeemed it. At first I thought it was just wistful nostalgia that made me view the earlier books as being better and the later ones as total crap, but you see, I hadn't ever read this little thing called "A New Spring" when it was just in that anthology, and so when it came out as a full book, after book after book of total shit, I saw the Robert Jordan that had interested me in the first place - great setup, killer suspense, wonderful delivery and a big bang at the end. It was never serious literature, but it was damn fun. I realized that I hadn't become jaded to the series; Jordan had just gone into the shitter as a writer.

I got a few hints of the former greatness in Knife of Dreams, and again in Gathering Storm, and there are a few more (sustained, even) glimpses of it in this book, but it wasn't good enough to redeem the mountains upon mountains of shit that have piled up since Dumai's Wells.

It's better than I thought it was going to be, but not spectacularly amazing, and it would have had to have been spectacularly amazing to redeem pieces of total worthlessness like Crossroads of Twilight.

Demandred was wasted, the damane situation is completely absurd (I smell a door to a follow-on series that happens hundreds of years later, probably with someone other than Sanderson), and there are plenty of other things that were just hastily and sloppily resolved. But it was resolved, and it's over. And now I'll go back to reading things that provide more than the literary equivalent of a grease-soaked bag of onion rings.