A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

This volume concludes Robert Jordan's series, The Wheel of Time. It is massive in every sense of the word: it wraps up an epic story, it contains a cast of characters in the hundreds, and one of its chapters is almost two hundred pages long. Sanderson does an admirable job bringing Jordan's material to a close--a task that Jordan himself was having trouble doing (as evidenced by the meandering plots of the last few books he wrote). There are still elements of the series that bother me (Rand's three women, as one example, and the huge number of plots, for another)--but most of these elements seem to have sprung out of the middle of the series, when Jordan seems to have lost the thread. And thread is really the right word for this series in particular, because so much of the magic and mythology is based on the idea of weaving--a metaphor which really struck me as I was reading this book. I was actually really satisfied with the ending. It was thoughtful, it was surprising at times, and it neither shied away from tough consequences and deaths nor unduly punished its characters. I think I will remember and ponder the ending for a long while, and I could even see myself re-reading the series at some point in the future--which I would have been much less likely to do before reading this book.