I've been trying to write for a week now my summation of Egwene in tGS. And it was SUPPOSED to be mostly positive, within reasonable limits and with some perspective, in contrast to the overblown hyperbole about her performance that has been flying around this site since the release. My predictions about her appearance in the book were more right than wrong, after all. Yet, I still felt she did much better in this book than she has previously, and was preparing a review of that portion of the book that would not make a person of honest & reasonable perception vomit at the excessive praise.

BUT I CAN'T!!! The list of pros and cons for her in this book is on paper and the pros are awfulyl thin and looking lamer my the minute, and the more you look at her the worse she appears! She DID do quantifiably good things in this book, but writing them up in a non-ridiculous fashion is difficult to do without making them seem lame and pathetic and feeling like you are trying too hard. When compiling the "Egwene's evil" list, there were episodes where I felt I was reaching too much, and thus toned them down, dropped them off the list, or merged them together in one entry with a bunch of similarly petty offenses. But now, trying to defend her, I am feeling the same way.

I am wondering if just going ahead and posting the bad stuff (Egwene's evil. Part 36! ) might get me over the hump and allow me to figure out more good about her performance, but somehow I doubt it.

Part of this, I think, has to do with the writing. I have hardly re-read tGS at all, except to clarify certain points of what happened. And that was really the only thing there was to derive from reading tGS - you find out what happens next to the characters. Before, re-reading was a pleasure, but for tGS, well, the 800th or so re-read of aCoS I was in the middle of when tGS came out was more enjoyable on the reading aspect than reading tGS. And I had no expectations coming in to this book to be disappointed with, either. It simply is not as well written as the others, Sanderson's use of language is pathetic even compared to most fiction writing in general (it's actually a lot like reading Terry Goodkind - good ideas that the writer has no clue how to properly express), and simply not as much fun to reread. I am enjoying the style of Winston Churchill's tGS more than Sanderson's! And that might be part of my problem with Egwene - for most of the books (and even in compiling the Egwene's evil list) I had read them so often that I had little need to refer to the books except for the exact wordings of quotes. I simply don't have that level of familiarity with this book, despite owning it for almost a month. When I am posting here, I am usually at work, and thus do not have the book with me to look up Egwene's chapters for instances of good works or deeds (it says a lot about her, IMO, that I have to search for such things). When I am home and the book is handy, well, I have a lot better things to do than...research. Research. That's what reading tGS again feels like to me. I majored in English, rather than History, in college expressly to avoid research. I am finding that I would rather clean the aliens & heretics out of the Kaurava system one more time, or have conversations with people, or go to the gym or read books on economics than sit down with tGS again!

But eevn with my procrastination of the research, I more or less remember everything she does in the book, and I am starting to wonder now if, ironically, my initial impression about Egwene in this book was inaccurrate, in my POSITIVE assessment!