A review by rwilhoyte
Wizard and Glass by Stephen King

3.0

It's amazing that, as long as GoodReads has existed, there's still no way of clearly changing your mind upon a reread regarding a rating. Apparently, this story was 5 stars for me when I first read it and now I'm knocking it down to three stars...mainly because it pumps the breaks so hard after the pacing of The Wastelands and spends a lot of time telling what is supposed to be an epic love story between two horny teenagers. I would argue that Susan and Roland aren't in love, they are in lust and 14. I can see why people read it as the Dark Tower epic love story because it's really similar to Romeo and Juliet. Wizard and Glass is mainly there to justify a change of attitude in Roland toward the rest of his new ka-tet but I'm not sure how much he actually changes or how much it matters to later events that he softens. I mostly read this novel thinking of Susan as a "refrigerator woman", a female character introduced and killed off to cause some emotional change in a male protagonist. I'm not a fan of that trope in comics and I find it kind of annoying here. The shady dealings happening in Mejis feel like filler, boring filler. Even Cuthbert and Alain are bored. I gave this book 3 stars because it does pick back up at the end and lead into a cool sequence.