So, here I come to the beginning of the end, the first novel that Brandon Sanderson finished for the astoundingly long-running and complex Wheel of Time series. I came into this with my expectations high. After just finishing the final chapter of The Gathering Storm, I can say with confidence that this book not only met my expectations, but surpassed them.Sanderson states in the foreword that he could never write the final three books as good as Robert Jordan could, but that's simply his humility and great respect for Robert Jordan. This book, the fruit of the combination of two great literary minds, is orders of magnitude better than either of them could ever have made by themselves. This is the best novel in the Wheel of Time, better even than any that Robert Jordan had written entirely himself.This is how the Wheel of Time was meant to be. I've enjoyed all of the previous novels in the series, but even the bigger ones have had the massive feeling of being imperfect, as they were so horrendously bloated with thousands of words that did not need to be there, and thus soured the whole. This book, however, has a subtly different feel from all the others, and I mean that in the best possible way. Almost all through this book, I found myself standing in awe at how incredible this series had been if it had had this right direction from the beginning all through the end.Almost all of the fat and cruft has been burned away. The weaknesses of the series have been repaired. There were times when the pages seemed to melt away and I lost track of them, instead of forcing myself to read a quota every day to get the book done, as I experienced with "Crossroads of Twilight." All of the characters were true to their previous portrayals and personalities, the result, no doubt, of Sanderson's extensive research and rereads before he wrote this. Though I felt a feeling of nostalgia, of ties to the previous installments, it all felt almost immeasurably better and more natural.Though this novel is only average by the length standards of the series, the amount of progress made in this book is off the charts. It is at, and sometimes beyond, the progress made in much faster paced but still large stories. Rand and Egwene and particular seem to have gone farther and more more progress in this book alone than they usually do in three or four of the previous novels. I am manifestly glad that Sanderson opted for putting more focus on the main characters and less on the tertiary ones. Instead of spending +20 pages wondering who this new POV character is and why I should care about them, I instead find myself glad to read a couple of pages from an Aes Sedai in the tower during a key event, seeing the events that I know are happening from a brief, but new, perspective. That is how it should have been all along.The amounts of emotion and character development were taken to their utmost extreme. I don't think that I can ever remember feeling this much emotion throughout the course of a single book before. It seems more fit for an entire series. The prose is brilliant, a near perfect blend of Robert Jordan's descriptive style, with Sanderson's faster pace and tighter story. (A much improvement over the previous books.) There are so many incredibly awesome moments that I can't even think of which one to list as my favorite in the book, though everything around the ending was particularly noteworthy. I probably couldn't mention any of them anyway, as they would be spoilers. My only small quibble is that Elayne is conspicuously absent from this book. Well, I'll be looking forward to getting back to her in the next book.This book is like a great, wonderful reward received at the end of a long journey, the journey that has been all the books in the series. This book is how the Wheel of Time should always have been. Though I have bad experiences with Sanderson writing one awesome book and then giving me two horribly flawed sequels, The Gathering Storm has renewed my faith in him in regards to the writing of the last two books in this series.The Gathering Storm receives five big, whole, perfect stars, and is my clear favorite in the entire series. Hats off to both Brandon Sanderson for his exemplary work and passion in finishing this series, and Robert Jordan for laying the groundwork for his magnum opus to at last be perfected.This is what was meant to be.