With Crossroads of Twilight, Jordan's gargantuan fantasy sequence The Wheel of Time reaches its tenth huge volume and hits some of the consequences of its own sheer scale. Jordan is running so many story lines--the struggle with the covert agents of evil, the creation of a male magic that is not polluted, the war with magic-using dragon-riders from across the sea, the adventures of a travelling circus--that he has to spend almost all of this book just keeping us in touch with the movements of his characters and how they are getting on. This is a book with a fair amount of incident, but nothing you could really call a climax. One of Jordan's strengths has always been his ability to send things off at interesting and imaginative tangents, revealing that his is a stranger world than we have begun to know--there is not enough of that here, and rather too much in the way of confrontations and kidnappings and dilemmas of conscience that recapitulate things he has done before. His decent, lumbering "grey" style means that there are no moments when the writing thrills us either--this is a book for those who have committed to Jordan's sequence for the long haul rather than one for new readers to sample. --Roz Kaveney
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