The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

Summary
Having captured Semirhage in book eleven, Rand al'Thor now has her tied up in the mansion he's living in in the back woods of Arad Doman with his army. Cadsuane, Nynaeve, and Min, meanwhile are concerned about his mental health.

Semirhage gets loose, though, and comes after Rand with a vengeance, putting a domination band on him and forcing him to strangle Min. Min and Rand escape, just barely, and Rand determines to become even harder, even meaner, so that no one can take advantage of his weakness again.

That leads his friends to be even more concerned about his mental health. They come up with a plan to fix him.

Meanwhile, the world is getting worse and worse. Food is spoiling randomly. Even though spring has come, the trees don't blossom, the grass won't grow.
Egwene still thinks she can fix the White Tower but after a confrontation with Elaida, she is imprisoned and accused of being a darkfriend. They might execute her! And then the Seanchan attack.

What I liked
This book balances Rand's internal drama and his descent into madness with plenty of action and suspense. There's even a middle of the night killer zombie episode. The end is surprising and happy and I really liked that. The character development was fantastic.

What I didn't like
It was long. I got the feeling that Brandon Sanderson thought that Robert Jordan's original draft was somehow sacred or something and shouldn't be cut. So there were pages and pages of writing that didn't add much to the story--too much description, too much explanation--especially in the first half of the book. It gets much neater towards the end. There was some pointless drama--I felt like Egwene should torch Gawyn with balefire to fix the pointless drama problem of the series--but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Conclusion
A great addition to the series. It builds a ton of suspense, many of the developments are surprising. It's good, and mostly well written. My favourite part, though, is Rand's character development in this series. So here's 4.5/5 violent patricidal temper tantrums.