Book: The Fires of Heaven, Robert Jordan

And yet another chapter closes in the saga that is The Wheel of Time. Characters have levelled up, geographies have transformed and plots developed. TFoH was a comfortable read: it's come to the point where I was successfully guessing the themes and pages to come - but don't get me wrong, that isn't to say that the book was formulaic or predictable either.

One of the downsides of cramming on a saga like this is that you don't get a chance to absorb and develop as the characters do - they have been written to unfold and develop over years rather than months and so the transformations they have gone though can be jarring for someone like me who is reading them back to back. But that's a minor, almost tenuous complaint really, although I have to say I was vastly irritated by one of the lead characters (I'm almost certain that was by design).

A cracking book and series, I'm left looking forward to six.