The Dragon Reborn

Author – Robert Jordan

Paperback
Pages: 705
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: November 15, 1990
ISBN-10: 0812513711
ISBN-13: 978-0812513714

Yarr! There be spoilers for the series ahead. Ye’ve been warned!

Imagine this:

When Robert Jordan originally pitched the idea of Wheel of Time to his publishing company it was supposed to be a trilogy. In the outline, the first novel was supposed to end with Rand claiming Callandor. Uh, yeah. In reality it took just shy of 2,137 pages or 824,372 words for Rand to claim that glowing sword in The Dragon Reborn. Readers often complain about the turgidness of the middle volumes in the series, but it’s evident even in the early volumes that Jordan had bitten off much, much more than he could chew in the space he felt he had. He proposed a trilogy, Tor Books told him six books. We all know how it’s gone since then.
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The Dragon’s Path

Author – Daniel Abraham

Trade Paperback
Pages: 592
Publisher: Orbit Books
Release Date: April 7th, 2011
ISBN-10: 0316080683
ISBN-13: 978-0316080682

SYNOPSIS
EXCERPT

In June of 2010, I threw a bit of a fit. I’d learned that not only was Tor Books not going to be publishing anymore novels by Daniel Abraham, they weren’t even going to do his fans the service of releasing the final volume of his The Long Price Quartet in paperback. I went on record, then, saying that Tor would regret letting the promising author go, that they were foolish to let such a promising young writer slip through their fingers.

Orbit Books wasted no time in snapping up Abraham and immediately announcing The Dagger and the Coin, a new series completely unrelated to The Long Price Quartet and set within a more familiar frame that was sure to appeal to the casual Fantasy fan that is so important in ensuring Abraham’s continued and inevitable rise through the genre. Tor made a mistake in letting him go and there’s no better proof of that than The Dragon’s Path, the first volume of The Dagger and the Coin.
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Shades of Milk and Honey

Author – Mary Robinette Kowal

Hardcover
Pages: 304
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: August 3rd, 2010
ISBN-10: 076532556X
ISBN-13: 978-0765325563

SYNOPSIS
EXCERPT

Cliché as it might sound, if Jane Austen had sat down to pen a fantasy, this is the book she would have written.
     —Intergalactic Medicine Show

It might be a cliche, but it seems almost impossible to avoid commenting on Mary Robinette Kowal’s debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, without referring to Jane Austen and her classic works of literature. It’s a comparison encouraged by Kowal (who cites Austen as an inspiration for the novel) and her publishers, but lifts expectations to sky-high proportions. For those unfamiliar with Austen the draw of the novel is more likely the melding of classic period literature with the fantastic in the form of glamour, a type of soft magic used by high-society to decorate their homes and enhance theatre. It wouldn’t be unfair of a reader to think of the novel as Beauty and the Beast told from the perspective of the Beast, a play on the classic tale that Kowal herself subverts with some tongue-in-cheek within in the pages of Shades of Milk and Honey; or, if you’re feeling very coy, you might describe it as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies without the zombies.
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The Great Hunt

Author – Robert Jordan

Paperback
Pages: 705
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: November 15, 1990
ISBN-10: 0812517725
ISBN-13: 978-0812517729

Yarr! There be spoilers for the series ahead. Ye’ve been warned!

Re-reading The Eye of the World was an interesting experience, but a bit banal. You see, thanks to its small cast of characters and traditional plot, I remembered so damn much of it that there was little surprise left within its pages. A few small things here and there, some nicely veiled foreshadowing of events that won’t transpire for thousands of pages, or an odd secondary character might have slipped my memory, but, for the most part, the novel went along exactly as I remembered it.

Not so with The Great Hunt. Hurin? Verin? Ingtar? Yeah, I couldn’t’ve told you they were in the novel. Hell, I forgot that Padan Fain was such a catalyst for the whole damn chase that comprises the core of the plot! In any case, it was a welcome change from my experience with The Eye of the World and allowed me to read the novel with a bit of excitement, as I’d forgotten what lay around every corner.
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The Eye of the World

Author – Robert Jordan

Paperback
Pages: 832
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: January, 1990
ISBN-10: 0812511816
ISBN-13: 978-0812511819

Yarr! There be spoilers ahead. Ye’ve been warned!

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one age,called the Third Age by some, an age yet to come, an Age long past,a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist.The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

So, it’s finally that time. Back in highschool, after I’d run out of Terry Goodkind books to read, burned myself out on Terry Brooks and filled my boots with Salvatore, I finally caved and gave into my friends’ advice to read Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World. I was a stubborn ass, though, and knew it wouldn’t be up to snuff, knew Jordan wasn’t fit to clean Goodkind’s laundry.

Oh, what a fool I was, at least in retrospect.
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