There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.
Read MoreImagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.
“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?
Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.
Read MoreBeyond the expanded scope from adventuring party to nation-state wrangling, the plot has to slow for another major reason: Travelling. Rand can warp around, collapsing time and distance in such a way that “the journey” as a trope barely exists anymore. And “the journey” is the beating heart of the Fantasy genre: we all live in the travelogue that “There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Tale” built. Now that he and a few others can move around the world near-instantly, plot-restrictions-via-distance are a thing of the past.
Read MoreWhat I wrote about Perrin in The Shadow Rising holds true for Nynaeve in this volume; she is a microcosm to understand another of Rand’s problems. This time, it isn’t about delegating responsibility and accepting your limits, but about understanding—maybe even embracing—who you are; even if you don’t want to. Rand has to come to terms with Lews Therin: his past, his present, and his refusal to put women in danger, even to the point where Moiraine has to sacrifice herself to save him.
Read MoreIt is weird feeling of anxiety, balancing reading through a book quickly because it pleases you, but slowing down because there is not an easy way to pick up the next in the series. For good or ill, the third book in the Wheel of Time is where the series finds its feet. All the characters are who I remember them being: Mat’s not a jerk anymore; Perrin is a little boring; Elayne, Egwene, and Nynaeve start rolling their eyes with exasperation at “men” on the reg:
Read MoreTwo households, both alike in dignity, except this time fair Verona is the entire space-time continuum. Because they’re not just rival agents and star-crossed lovers, but interdimensional beings butterfly-effecting the timestream, unstitching each other’s work while needling their own intricate patterns.
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