The main female characters get a lot of action in Eye but barely any POVs (I think there are a couple of Nynaeve and two Moirane?). However the POVs start coming with increasingly frequency after that. And there are a number of chapters where the females can be called “co stars”. Like Perrin + Egwene with the Tuatha’an.
I would say the series featured Females extensively, especially considering it looks like it’s starring the 3 boys early (and the outsized role they play in events going forward). Now if you wanted to complain about how some of that is done sure. But the females are getting a ton of action and writing. I still wouldn’t call it “female-driven” as IMO it calls to mind something a bit different.
If you never got past book 1, I wish you luck. They series was great until book 5 or so… I never made it to 7 myself. My kids read all 4574, and kinda hate me for it (though they did enjoy when Sanderson picked it up to finish it - but they were very bitter about 6-10 or whatever).
The first book is pretty generic fantasy questing. It doesn’t get into what makes WoT special (to the extent one feels it is) that much until book 2. From there IMO things move at a very nice clip through book 8. (Some people say it bogs down before then, but not me.) Book 9, roughly one thing of any consequence happens (though it’s a doozy) and that at the veeery end. Book 10, everyone pretends the thing that happens in book 9 didn’t happen, and nothing else does either. Book 11, a few things start moving again? And then Jordan died and Sanderson picked up for a very eventful final three books, though they just don’t quite feel like Jordan.
If you do get back to it, I strongly suggest reading them all in direct succession, especially if you intend to actually plow through 9-11 instead of just skimming an online recap or something. I think in the context of having just read the preceding books it’s about possible to remember everything well enough for those books to have some value, but keep your expectations low.
I can’t remember how many books in I got but I read a bunch of them in college and I think it was this series that cured me of any lingering interest in the fantasy genre.
I thought the first book was a bith meh, myself. The series improved on the second book, and the best part are books 4-7. In general the problem of the series are book 8-10, as books 11-13 are good again.
Wheel of Time is amazing: better than Game of Thrones, and I offer you this opinion without having finished either series.
I think Jordan could have ended WoT after book 3… but he made a change of course during the writing. Just my intuition.
Anyway, try Sara Douglass; I grabbed one of her books before a long road trip many years ago and we read it aloud: my sister began devouring her catalog after that, and I eventually realized I ought to catch up.
I can’t remember the proper names of her books right now, but the Wayfarer-Starman hexalogy is solid and I enjoyed the one about gem-setting and an ancient pyramid.
I read Lord of Chaos and Fires of Heaven at a very difficult time in my life and took great comfort in escaping into another place. Jordan will always be appreciated by me because of that; some meticulous world-building in his books.
He went into too much detail and that was his downfall. Seems Malazan takes the opposite approach using big broad strokes and leaving it to the reader to figure crap out. Honestly a Malazan TV series would probably add more as TV would be forced to define things better. Still, I’m looking forward to WOT on TV.
Having read each WoT book as it was published, and only once, I’m still of the opinion that books 7-10 could’ve been condensed into a single book. That was the “let’s milk this bitch for all the $$$ we can get” phase of the series. Terrible books, each progressively worse. The sad thing is Jordan’s cancer diagnosis saw book 11 return to the form present in the first three or four in terms of quality and pacing.
