I can appreciate what Crossroads of Twilight is trying to do without finding the result satisfying. Letting distant characters respond to a momentous event should enlarge the world. Here, the overlapping timeline too often drains urgency from it. We spend a great deal of time approaching developments whose significance we already understand.
Perrin's fixation is emotionally legible, but repetition narrows him. Elayne's political work also has a credible purpose while testing the limits of how much procedural detail the story needs. The problem is not that these characters lack important concerns. It is that the book repeatedly returns to those concerns without giving them enough new shape.
There are worthwhile observations about loyalty and the unglamorous work of holding power. They do not compensate for the lack of forward movement across the whole volume. I would not advise a first-time reader to skip it and lose the connective material, but I would set expectations honestly: this is the stretch where commitment to the series has to carry the reading experience.
— Cory Lane