The Way of Kings

Brandon Sanderson has loomed at the periphery of my literary awareness for a few years now. An author selling these massive tomes for millions of diehard fans is always someone to cheer for in my mind, and The Stormlight Archive was suggested to me personally as perhaps his greatest accomplishment. Especially after seeing one of the strangest and most un-generous articles I've ever read (https://archive.is/A59bw) targeted at him, I felt personally compelled to see what books could possibly generate this much discussion.

But alas: this book left me wanting a lot more.

Sanderson's gift, by far, is writing a compelling plot in a huge, imaginative world. The various stories of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar all weave together neatly, and the mythology backing the expanses of Roshar gives the setting a depth that lets the individual stories remain in conversation with tales going back thousands of years. He is skilled at building a world that's rich and complex, dusting his prose with references to the world's native plants, currencies, languages, peoples, and religions.

His particular gift for plot is in its clarity — I always felt clear on characters' motivations and goals, and scenes are lined up with care to always make the reader feel well-equipped to understand what's going on. He constructs his plot the way a magician constructs a magic trick, pulling your attention one way while the mechanics of the world operate unseen, just outside of your field of vision. If anything, Sanderson has characterized TWOK is being difficult almost precisely because there's so much information given in the first half of the novel in order to equip the reader with enough context, background, and lore to fully dive in to the back half where the action really gets going.

But personally, that's about as far as my interest went. I really wanted to love this book, but as I crossed the halfway mark — the area where Sanderson clearly wants to crank up the heat — I sensed my interest losing steam. Where things started to come together, in a way they felt almost too straight-laced, and the characters began to fall short of the depth I was searching for.

.... full review here 👇