Meghan’s Reviews > The Waste Lands > Status Update

Part 6, the last part has us meeting up with Blaine again. We didn’t realize that he was a train. He’s the one that will either take them to the next stage of the dark tower or not. He’s made an ultimatum with Roland, Susannah, Eddie and Jake that we won’t find out until the next book. Le sigh.

All is not lost, but kept together. Together Roland and Oy save the day and so our characters move on. We get this back story on the Tick Tock Man… before he became him. It feels like our timelines are blending because we’re not sure where this fits into the story or what it exactly means, but it did build some suspense for the last 50 pages!

It wouldn’t be a complete adventure if something wasn’t chasing them trying to kill them and we’ve got the Tick Tock Man who is after Jake and it looks like the Roland is going to have to try and save him with a doglike creature named Oy. The reader is saddened by that, but extremely curious of the fate of Jake. There’s something so endearing about his character we wouldn’t want to lose him.

We’re slowly progressing on as our three have encounter a group called the Grays and one called the Pubes. They are strange, but they warn that where our three are headed is deadly. This leaves us suspicious as to where exactly they’re going and what’s going to happen next. This is still fast-paced to read, yet slow in terms of actual plot progression. Only 150 pages left!

We’ve entered part 5 (of book 2) and our trio are making their way through a city, across a suspension bridge… which we’re guessing is on route to the Dark Tower. This has given us a chance to see these three together, how they work together, communicate and get along. It’s been great characterizations, while the plot moves slowly on.

We’ve started book 2 with some new characters who are in this world and giving our main characters stories about the life they live and some background to the world, which is assumed they’re talking about the waste lands. To be honest, it was a lot of long passages that didn’t do much for the overall story. Maybe it’ll come into play, but it was tediously long.

Book 1 is in the review mirror; this ended with Eddie, Roland and Susannah fighting off demons, and Jake on the other side fighting to get to their world. It was a lot of back and forth time travel that was really fast-paced, yet easy to follow. Now that they’re all together, we’re so curious what book 2 has in store for us!

We’ve just entered part 3 of book 1 where it’s a back and forth of Jake in the real world and Roland and co. in the mid-world. They’re going to collide at some point, we feel it, and it will have something to do with the key they both possess. It has powers that no one understands yet, but we have faith it will come together soon.

We get more from Jake and he’s still torn between the real world, where he’s missed a bunch of school work and the fantasy world, where he’s been writing all this down. Not really sure the relevance with Charlie the Choo Choo is, we probably won’t ever know. It’s kinda reads as a metaphor, but for what we’re not sure just yet.

Part two starts with Jake and what happened to him. The reader finds this so fascinating; Jake is such an interesting character. He’s torn between two selves and we see how it happened, we just don’t know why yet, and we’re so curious to see what it leads to and how it fits into the bigger picture with Roland and company. Again, some very fast paced storytelling.