A Crown of Swords (which really sounds like it should be a book in the Game of Thrones series, doesn't it?) is the seventh entry in Robert Jordan’s wildly successful fantasy novel series collectively known as The Wheel of Time. It was published in 1996 and continued the series trademark of pushing the limits of how heavy an item readers could hold up with just two hands. Actually, A Crown of Swords clocks in as one of the shorter novels in the series though, of course, the term short is entirely relative.
More troubling for some critics (and fans) than the increasing sturdy shelving required to hold all books comprising The Wheel of Time series with the release of lucky number seven was the distinct sense that while the book pays off in building the dramatic tension of the seemingly inexorable wait for the final showdown between good and evil, it is not nearly as satisfying at doing the job of quickening the pace at which individual plotlines were tracking.
A cursory quest across the vast realm of internet blogs, book reviews, discussion forums and social media posts reveal a word cloud dominated by certain recurring themes: stagnated, redundant, drags, annoying. That being said, however, a curiosity worth mentioning should also be noted: a seemingly inordinate number of reviews covering the entire series to this point single out A Crown of Swords as being their favorite of the seven books covering The Wheel of Time publication history. The only truly universal reaction to the novel seems to be that either it will wind up rising to a position among the cream of the crop of a reader’s ranking of the books in the series or it will sink effortlessly to the bottom, never to be re-read except under the psychology duress of obsessive-compulsion when attacking a book series.
Actually, there is another universally agreed-upon aspect to A Crown of Swords. It is one of the easiest of the vast volumes to narrow down plot-wise as it basically follows just three narrative threads: Rand’s preparations to launch the assault against the Forsaken Sammael, the quest to stymie the Dark One’s climate control through the efforts of multiple characters to find the Bowl of Wind, and the political intrigue involving the Aes Sedai in the White Tower. Of course, with final page count numbers closer to 1,000 than 500 depending upon format, there is much more going on than that barest of bones summary would indicate. Nevertheless, keep in mind that another term that would show up in big bold letters in that word cloud of thoughts and opinions about A Crown of Swords would be something along the lines of “not much happens.”
