I think it comes down to this: there are a lot of good fantasy series out there right now. Many writers are finding a great balance between, on the one hand, standing on the shoulders of what's come before and, on the other, not being slaves to the genre's less compelling tropes. The Wheel of Time, begun in the 1980s, feels like the throwback it now is. And I find that tough to get through, even though I don't necessarily feel that any given book is an altogether "bad" one.
The Dragon Reborn keeps the trend going, though the particulars are different this time around. Robert Jordan's plotting is considerably better in this installment. I actually raced through the first 200 pages or so of the novel in only a matter of days. The novel ironically jettisons the title character almost entirely; he pops up only for a few paragraphs every hundred pages or more, leaving the bulk of the book free to focus on some of the side characters. And as it happened, their stories were generally more compelling than the rather conventional "hero's journey" material surrounding that main character.
But at the same time, though the story picked up, the writing itself was in decline. I have a couple of friends who generally stay away from fantasy books, no matter how good I say they are. One has told me, "I hate it when they spend half a page describing the leaves on a tree." I personally don't think fantasy is like that (not always, anyway), but The Dragon Reborn absolutely is. Robert Jordan goes on at laborious length describing the surroundings of every street, river, and tree one of the characters walks by. He never says in 10 words what he could say in a hundred. And yet he spends virtually no time on the physical attributes of any of his characters, major or minor. The result is the feeling of a dozen amorphous automatons drifting through a picturesque tourism advertisement.
It seemed to me like somebody must have pointed out to Jordan between books two and three just how shallow and similar all his characters were, because he seems to make a concerted effort in this book to inject some mannerisms into them. The trouble is, he basically assigns one quirk to each of them, and then repeats it endlessly on every other page. The result is, for example, three young women all still interchangeable in their haughty entitlement, except that one constantly tugs on her braided hair. See? Characterization!
And yet, down on the book as I am, I did devour the first third of it at a pace unthinkable for me after the first two volumes. So when I think about assigning a letter grade to this one, it doesn't seem fair that I would think of it -- even with its flaws -- as being any worse than the first two. So I give The Dragon Reborn a B-. But once again, I'm anticipating a hiatus, filled with other books, before I come back around (if I come back around) to the fourth volume.
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