The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Seriously — and I hate to say this — it was almost better than the last few books written by Jordan himself. :X
The amount of characters are kept to a minimum — the action is easy to follow, and you don’t feel yourself being overwhelmed by characters being introduced that you may have not read about in years. My only criticism — and it’s small — may be that perhaps some of the character interactions aren’t fleshed out enough… but no, I’m not going to go there. I’m happy with the way it’s written.
Rand, in particular, develops into an incredibly interesting character in this book — I personally thought his development had stagnated just a bit, and The Gathering Storm has certainly made up for that!