Legends is a collection of short novels by various authors including Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Tad Williams, and others. Robert Jordan excels in characterization. His characters truly seem like living, breathing people you might meet on the street tomorrow, and over the course of the series they develop on many levels. The land is well-characterized, too, drawn with fascinating detail against a historical context that makes sense on social, political, and economic scales. The story weaves a rich tapesty, smoothly incorporating elements of European, Native American, Norse, Russian, and Japanese mythology.
Many people criticize Jordan as being wordy.
Maybe even too wordy. I reread that book after reading the three that followed it and changed my opinion. Some words established facts about the characters, the places they lived, and the things they experienced. Other words set up conflicts or provided background information for things that would only be developed in later books. This wasn't obvious in my first reading, of course, but it was truly a serendipity on the second reading.