Winter's Heart - So unremarkable I forgot to review it [belated review time]

I just realized, after maybe four months, that I never reviewed book 9 of the Wheel of Time, Winter’s Heart. I can excuse myself by saying simply that it wasn’t an incredibly significant addition to the series, but there were some things I enjoyed about it. At the very end. Much of the book was just a continuation of previously developed plot-lines that didn’t seem to go anywhere until the very end.

In fact, Perrin’s search for Faile is not even resolved in this book. Only Mat and Rand actually get anywhere with their conflicts, but where they both end up is well-worth reading through so many chapters of Perrin’s failure.

I loved the atmosphere of this novel. It’s a shame that such a striking change in the aesthetics of this novel wasn’t accompanied by a big change in the story itself (until the end, of course, where we have a huge change). We have gone through eight books of the Wheel of Time series with no winter. Finally the natural order has been restored and we have snow-covered lands and a world of white. This changes the dynamic of the world we’ve come to know in interesting ways. And ok, fine, by the end of the book we have great sweeping changes to accompany the snow.