The Dragon Reborn
Robert Jordan
699 pages
published in 1991
The Dragon Reborn is the third book in the Wheel of Time series and as such it does not quite have the worst artwork in the series. That honour is reserved for either the previous book The Great Hunt, with its depiction of Trollocs as humans with curved helmets or the sixth book, The Lord of Chaos, with its incompetent romance novel cover. No book in the series however has what you can call good art, or even art that bears much resemblence to the books its used on. That’s not unusual for any book of course and normally I don’t care too much about what’s on a cover, but the Darrell Sweet artwork on these is just too embarassing, especially when read in public. But never mind eh? It’s still much, much better than reading Dan Brown where people can see you.
Moving on to what’s between the covers, The Dragon Reborn is the last book in the series to duplicate the quest structure of The Lord of the Rings and also the last book in which the various storylines neatly come together in the end. It’s not the end of the series, as the series has no end, but it’s a end. From the next book, The Shadow Rising onward, things would be much more complicated. It’s also a sort of beginning, as this is the first book which is not dominated by Rand as the main character; in fact he’s hardly in it, with much of the action focussing on Perrin, Mat and Egwene/Nynaeve/Elayne in three different storylines, which come together at the climax of the book, just as with the previous two books.