ew Dawn was published after the tenth novel in Jordan's Wheel of Time Series. It's not volume 11 though, or even volume 10.5. It's a prequel, set about 20 years before the series began, and the main character is Aes Sedai Moraine, with her friend and fellow Aes Sedai Siuan a major character, as is Lan, who readers of the rest of the series know as Moraine's warder.

I do not recommend that you read this novel before reading books 1-10 in the Wheel of Time series, because New Dawn contains a lot of WoT spoilers. In fact, I don't really recommend New Dawn to WoT fans, unless you have a burning desire to plow through a 300 page novel that contains about 10 pages of interesting background info and 290 pages of familiar characters doing non-suspenseful things 20 years before WoT really begins.

This review is full of spoilers for the Wheel of Time series, since New Dawn does too, and there's really no other way to review this book but by reference to WoT. If you haven't read this book or the series itself, your reaction will be more confusion than spoilerism, since the 10 books build a hugely-detailed world, and you'll have no idea what I'm talking about here. I won't give any spoilers about New Dawn itself, but on the other hand, there really aren't any spoilers, since this is set 20 years before WoT begins, and we know what all of the principles are doing then, which tells us pretty much how New Dawn is going to end.  Which is one of the fundamental flaws of this novel.

Scores, then more details:

The * scores are open to debate. Those I rated for this book alone; they would all be 2 or 3 points lower if I rated them as someone who has read the entire WoT series. It would be interesting to find out about Lan and Moraine and Siuan if you didn't already know them very well from reading WoT. The plot of this prequel novel would be interesting if you didn't already know how it was going to end and lead into the WoT series. On the other hand, tons of stuff would just be confusing or seem like a non sequitur or a red herring if you hadn't read WoT, since terms and people and races are constantly mentioned in New Spring with almost no explanation given.

Moreover, there are two main problems with New Dawn that make it fundamentally pointless:

1) If you've read the rest of the WoT series then this book is relatively boring and only of use as background information since there's no real suspense.

2) If you haven't read WoT you might at least enjoy the plot and get some suspense from this one, but you'll also get a ton of WoT spoilers, and you'd probably spend a great deal of time feeling confused by all of the character names, races, terms, etc, since New Dawn constantly throws in things WoT readers will appreciate, but which will baffle a new reader. 

As I said at the top, I actually recommend that you not read this book if you haven't read the rest of the WoT series, and even if you have I can only slightly recommend that you do read it, and even then only if you really want more background information and don't mind 300 pages of relatively boredom in the process.

New Dawn is basically pointless to read if you've read the WoT series, and it's actually bad to read if you haven't read WoT yet, since it spoils lots of the book.

As for the background information, it's not bad, but it's very scanty, and while I guess there's no other way to go about a prequel, it's sort of annoying how hard Jordan tries to work suspense into events that every WoT reader has already seen concluded.  Jordan keeps putting Moraine in danger, makes it seem like Lan might be forced into an unwanted marriage, spends a great deal of time with Moraine and Suian worrying if they'll pass their Aes Sedai test, talks about their excitement in possibly discovering the Dragon Reborn on the slopes of Dragonmount, etc.

Besides that "this would be fine if I suffered selective amnesia" stuff, he also throws in a lot of obviously post-dated info. Stuff he would never have put into the prequel if he'd actually written it before the rest of the WoT series, but that he's since worked into the novels and therefore wanted to give some background to. By this I mean things are in the prequel that never appeared in the novels until book 4 or 6 or 8, when he thought of them and threw them in. In that way New Spring reads like book 10.5 in a lot of ways, and that breaks the mood of it being any sort of prequel.  This is also probably unavoidable, and if it could be avoided the alternative would be to write it in a "playing dumb" sort of way that would be annoying to readers who are knowledgeable about WoT. It really is a no-win situation, and it's definitely giving me pause when I think about how I might handle my own potential future prequel writing.

So I don't much like the novel, but how do other people feel about it?

Amazon.com reviewers aren't vicious, but they're not big fans either. New Spring has earned a 3 star rating, based on 235 reviews. That's not an awful mark, but it's not very good for a popular writer in an critically undemanding genre like Fantasy.

Novels 1-7 in Jordan's Wheel of Time series all have at least a 4 star rating, and it's deserved, since they have good plots, good characters, and are written at a far higher level than the junior high shenanigans style of most paycheck fantasy authors. Jordan's fans are more demanding than the fans of pulp authors like Salvatore, since they expect more from Jordan. And since book 8, when the plot advancement began to decline, so have the review scores on Amazon.com. Book 8 has a 3 star score, book 9 rebounded a bit to 3.5, but by book 10 the revolt was on, and it's got a 1.5 star score from 2170 reviews, almost all of which take him to task for the failings of the entire series. Book 10 wasn't really that bad; and rated on its own merits it would deserve at least a 3 or 3.5 star score. The problem is that books 8 and 9 slowed things to a crawl, riling the fans, who then pulled out the long knives for book 10 when it was even worse, in terms of plot advancement. The 1.5 score isn't due to some huge drop in quality of book 10... it's due to pent up frustration and anger at the direction the overall series has taken since book 7.  If you want more on the problems with book 10, check out my review of it, where I quote angry Amazon.com reviewers and summarize the plot issues. They all sound pretty much like this 1-star review, which currently has a near-unanimous 97/101 helpful rating.

This is perhaps the worst book in the series so far. After a wait of over two years, we're presented with a series of unconnected snippets in which absolutely nothing happens. There is no forward movement whatsoever in the overall plot, and no issues are resolved. Most of the major characters are presented for a few brief chapters in which they essentially tread water, and we leave all of them at the end of the book pretty much where we found them at the beginning.

To move past book 10 and nitpick a bit about book 10.5, AKA New Dawn... My main complaint were all the things that felt written for book 10.5, rather than for a prequel.

I don't recall any mention of the Black Ajah ever, at any point in the WoT series, other than a few whispered rumors, until about book 7. Yet here we are in book 0, 20 years before book 1, and 2 of the main Aes Sedai characters for the entire series know all about the Black Ajah, have seen them in action, and have battled them, have seen them murder, etc. This felt very out of time, since the Black Ajah have become a big deal since book 9, but hardly existed before then.

Somehow none of the Aes Sedai remember that moraine and Siuan were best friends during their entire apprentice period, which lasted nearly 3 years. I'd assumed, before reading New Spring, that they were friends in the same class, or friends for a week, or friends secretly, and that those days had been much more than 20 years ago. Now that I know it was just 20 years ago, that Moraine and Siuan were inseperable during their training, became Aes Sedai on the same day, walked through the oath ceremony together, selected the blue Ajah together on the same day, etc. Given all that, how is it possible that out of the hundreds of Aes Sedai in the tower then, dozens of younger students who knew them and saw them every day, teachers, tower staff, etc, no one remembers this just twenty years later, when it would be a huge plot point for the vulnerable Siuan?

It's sort of like the amnesia Jedi Knight issue, when in Star Wars 4 and 5 none of the imperial commanders give any credence to the force and act like the Jedi have been gone for centuries, other than Darth Vader. And then come the prequels we find out that Jedi were the most powerful and important people in the universe just 20 years earlier, when most of those forgetful Imperial commanders must have been in their 20s and 30s and 40s and interacted with powerful Jedi on a daily basis. And they forgot that in 20 years?  (Well know, Lucas just hadn't thought the time line through when he wrote SW 4-6, but at least he's got the excuse of writing the prequels decades later.)

It's not an actual error, but Jordan spent way too much time trying to build suspense for things every WoT reader knew already. There must have been half a dozen detailed mentions of how excited Moraine and Siuan were at potentially finding the Dragon Reborn themselves, when they heard about taking names, went out taking names, started reading their private list of names, etc. Which would have been fine... if the fact that the identity of the Dragon Reborn was discovered over 20 years later, and was the central plot point of the entire WoT series.

Similarly, could we have heard Lan think how much he disliked Aes Sedai and how much he dreaded being bonded to one as a warder a few more times? Once or twice would have made for some amusing irony, since he's the most-discussed warder in the entire series, and along with his Aes Sedai Moraine is one of the major characters of the first 3 or 4 novels in the series. Hearing it every time he thought for more than two paragraphs in a row got very old, very quickly.

Jordan wasn't quite as ham-handed in his foreshadowing as Lucas has been in the Star Wars prequels, but there are some frightening parallels.

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