At this point, I think most readers will become obsessed with this series and finding the end result. Almost as dedicated, or obsessed, as Roland himself is for the tower. This book in particular has made it impossible to not finish the journey. Although it is really Roland's story, even more than the first book, The Gunslinger, it explains so much about his new ka tet and how ka has worked in Roland's life to bring them together on the journey of the tower. This story is full of adventure, love and emotion and makes the reader crave the rest of the story and wish that time was sometimes thin so it could be finished at once, without distractions of the real world and life ( )

I had high expectation with this books because all of my friends had given it a high rating.
Now, the book has points of being amazing and times when I wished it would just move on. The bookends are great with the portion at the very beginning (which should've been part of the last book, honestly) making me laugh my absolute ass off.
But the main portion of the book is largely a flashback of Roland's past. While it did have many interesting moments and does reveal a lot about Roland, it also just stretches on for way too long. It's well written , but it's a chore to get through because you know what's going to happen. I kept wondering why the heck I was expected to care about any of this past history. The main story barely advances at all! I feel like this should have been an in-between book, not a book that is part of the main story.
Eventually, the flashback story does become interesting and relevant, but man, it is slow getting there, and I really had to fight my frustration in order to finish the book.


( )

I have a lot of feelings about this one, and in a lot of ways I've read three and half books to finally get to the story the middle of this book is about. I'm pleased to have finally gotten to Susan's Story, and gotten to see it told the right way and not the way that it is written for the comics that once graced the counter of a store I was working at/getting books from.

I am growing a gruff and rough, but subtle love for the cowboy epic that is this tale as I plod my way through it this year, even though I have been warned about a good number of things. I love watching the descent of The Old World and The Old Ways, before 'the world moved on,' just as much I'm loving watching the main character draw closer and closer and closer together through their journey.

I may have wrinkled my nose at the sudden and magically appearance of the pink ball after in the current storyline conveniently after it being a big plot point in the flashback, and I'm still head-tippy uncertain how I feel about the Wizard of Oz mingle. Oy continues to be my most likely favorite character, but -- in true Amanda fashion -- I'm much more falling in love with this group of people as a unit than specifically one person among them. ( )

While this can be a little corny at times, i.e., when the "thinny" sounds too near, the men get their "balls" to tingling, it is a great story. But the balls, That's too much information for me.
In the beginning of the book, the five journeyers are riding Blain the Mono towards Topeka. Blaine has let them know that he's going to commit suicide by slamming through the piers at the end of the line, and take them along with him, unless they can riddle him a riddle that he cannot answer. Eddie gets the idea to tell Blaine some silly riddles, and one of them is a riddle my daughter told in a third grade talent show:
P.68-8:
" 'I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY --'
'then stop the mono,' Eddie said. " If you're that upset, stop right here, and I will.'
'NO.'
'okay, then, on we go. What's Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain?'
there was another one of those clicks, this time so loud it felt like having a blunt Spike driven against his eardrum. A pause of 5 seconds. now the flashing Green Dot on the route-map was so close to Topeka that it lit the word like neon each time it flashed. Then: 'PADDY O'FURNITURE.' "

While this was published in 1997, there were some Eerie parallels to what happened to the United States in 2020. Jake reads this from a newspaper they find in Topeka:
P.97:
" 'in national developments,' Jake read, 'conviction continues to grow that, after denying the superflu's existence during its early days, when quarantine measures might still have had some effect, national leaders have fled to underground retreats which were created as brain - trust shelters in case of nuclear war. vice-President Bush and key members of the Reagan cabinet have not been seen during the last 48 hours. Reagan himself has not been seen since Sunday morning, when he attended prayer services at Green valley Methodist Church in San Simeon.' "

14-year-old Roland has met 16-year-old Susan Delgado, as Old Roland begins his tale of what happened to him as a young gunslinger to his fellow journeyers. He's not only met her, but he's fallen in love with her. He and his fellow teenage gunslingers have been sent to Mejis, where they're supposedly being punished for tying one on and causing havoc in Gilead. They are formally introduced as "counters" at a welcoming dinner at the mayor's house in Hambry. That's where he finds out the ugly Truth about the young woman that he loves.
P.272-3:
" 'I'm surprised at ye, Young man, so I am. Ye may be from the In-World, but oh goodness, whoever tended to your education of the real world -- the one outside of books and maps -- stopped a mite short, I'd say. She's his --' and then a word so thick with dialect that Roland had no idea what it was. Seefin, it sounded, or perhaps sheevin.
'I beg pardon?' He was smiling, but the smile felt cold and false on his mouth...
'It means "quiet little woman," ' Renfrew said, clearly uncomfortable. 'it's an old term, not used much these days --'
'stop it, rennie,' said Coral Thorin [mayor's sister]. then to Roland: 'he's just an old cowboy, and can't quit shoveling horse s*** even when he's away from his beloved nags. Sheevin means side - wife. In the time of my great-grandmother, it meant whore.. but one of a certain kind.' she looked with a pale eye at susan, who was now sipping ale, then turned back to roland. there was a species of Baleful amusement in her eyes, and an expression that Roland liked little. 'The kind of whore you had to pay for in coin, the kind too fine for the trade of simple folk.'
'she his gilly?' Roland asked through lips which felt as if they had been iced."

Stephen King had to throw in several token episodes of animal cruelty. Besides some boys cutting off dogs tails, there's this little episode:
P.604-5:
" 'here,' the boy said, 'let me light it, Gods damn you.' Jonas [one of the mayor's hired killers, the so-called "coffin-hunters"] would have recognized the speaker; he was the lad who had waved a severed dog's tail across the street at Jonas and called, 'we're big coffin hunters just like you!'
the boy to whom this charming child had spoken tried to hold on to the Piece of liver they had copped from the knacker's behind the low market. The first boy seized his ear and twisted. The second boy howled and held the chunk of liver out, dark blood running down his grimy knuckles as he did.
'That's better,' the first boy said, taking it. 'You want to remember who the capataz is, around here.' [King uses some weird "Spanish" words in here.]
they were behind a bakery stall in the low market. Nearby, drawn by the smell of hot fresh bread, was a mangy mutt with one blind eye. he stared at them with hungry hope.
There was a slit in the chunk of raw meat. Poking out of it was a green Big-bang fuse. Below the fuse, the liver bulged like the stomach of a pregnant woman. the first boy took a sulfur match, stuck it between his protruding front teeth, and lit it.
'He won't never!' said a third boy, in an agony of Hope and anticipation.
'thin as he is?' the first boy said. 'Oh yes he will. But ye my deck of cards against your hosstail.'
The third boy thought it over and shook his head.
The first boy grinned. 'It's a wise child ye are,' he said, and lit the Big-Bang's fuse. 'Hey, cully!' He called to the dog. 'Want a bite o' sumpin good? Here ye go!'
He threw the chunk of raw liver. The scrawny dog never hesitated at the hissing fuse, but lunged forward with its one good eye fixed on the first decent food it had seen in days. As it snatched the liver out of the air, the Big-bang the boys had slipped into it went off. There was a roar and a flash. The dog's head disintegrated from the Jaws down. for a moment it continued to stand there, dripping, staring at them with its one good eye, and then it collapsed." ( )

First off, the cliffhanger from The Wastelands gets resolved. Roland and his ka-tet are engaged in a riddling contest with Blaine the AI controlling the monorail they are riding. I was a little disappointed at that entire plot contrivance, because it felt too much like Bilbo's riddling with Golem in The Hobbit (especially having read King's own admittance that he wanted The Dark Tower to be his own Lord of the Rings), and especially how it resolved, which was almost as much as a Deux ex Machina cheat as "What have I got in my pocket?" was for Golem. But I digress, that was a minor gripe.

Moving on, the ka-tet finds themselves in the world of King's The Stand, Kansas specifically, and they stop so Roland can tell them a long story about his youth, and here's where Wizard and Glass gets especially good. We hear of Roland and his friends (the ka-tet of his youth) traveling to the town of Mejis for cryptic reasons, how they meet Susan Delgado, who we heard about in a previous book, who Roland falls in love with, and he and his ka-tet have adventures worthy of some of the classic western blockbusters of the last decade. Very reminiscent of the The Magnificent Seven which is interesting because the director of that movie, John Sturges, is directly mentioned in later books in the Dark Tower series. King must be a fan. Anyway, this glimpse into Roland's backstory explains much about the man and he goes from a two dimensional shell to a more fully fleshed character, which is what the saga needed at this point.

That exciting tale of Roland's youth was probably my favorite story in the entire DT saga. Once Roland wraps it up and his ka-tet resumes their journey, they find themselves at something that looks like the Emerald City from Oz spanning I-70 across Kansas, and in there they meet Marten aka Randall Flagg, who escapes and they continue to follow him. ( )