Hocknose, on 23 February 2012 - 09:20 AM, said:
WoT is in some ways only barely family-friendly. (There is a great deal of innuendo.) It's definitely the product of a different generation, and while RJ and GRRM were more or less contemporaries, RJ for many years saw himself as being on the highbrow edge of the generation, which makes for a more restrained style. That being said, it does come across as having a light-fare flavor during the early chapters (not the prologue, which honestly is the best foreshadowing of things to come I could offer as a contrast), which is why I cautioned that it's not what it seems on the surface. There are also Tolkien parallels in the beginning—very deliberate ones. They are fleeting, though you could say those parallels play out in very subtle ways throughout the series. It's all underlying a larger, very original structure.
I had the same feeling about Brandon's books when I read them, that they were kinda on the YA side—in content and in prose style—and as a hardcore WoT fan, it worried me. WoT does not have a YA feel at all in my opinion. The prose is polished and intricate, and despite the youthful mains and the occasional slapstick, the world is every bit as deep as Malazan, despite different approaches. It's a deceptively traditional fantasy storyline, but not even as YA as IT or Flowers in the Attic. Brandon was influenced a lot by RJ, but he was chosen mainly because he was the only skilled and successful author who was both a big fan of the series and not so successful that he wouldn't leap at the chance. Brandon himself has referred to Venn diagrams to illustrate the point. It's amazing that he even existed really. He's come a long way since Mistborn, particularly on the WoT books where the effort is more deliberate, but you can still see the difference in prose and characterization in his two books, which bothers some readers more than others.