Oathbringer is the one where Dalinar really starts to impress me, and it’s also the one where the Stormlight Archive flagged a bit for me. I know this is a ten book series, and this middle stretch is where I noticed I didn’t care as much as I’d hoped to. Kaladin continues to disappoint, after the slide that began in Words of Radiance, and I’m not going to pretend that didn’t colour how I felt about the book. There’s plenty here to like, though, and a couple of things that genuinely surprised me. It’s also a huge book, well over a thousand pages, so there’s a lot of room for both.
The biggest surprise was the Everstorm turning the parshmen into the Voidbringers. I’m sure smarter people than me saw this coming, but I always assumed in book one and most of book two that there was yet a third entity, something that came from somewhere else, that the humans and possibly the Parshendi had historically fought. Instead the Everstorm has turned the parshmen across Roshar into singers led by the Fused, and the people who’ve been serving humans in the background the whole time are suddenly the enemy. It changes how you look at everything that came before it, and it caught me completely off guard. Once you know, you can’t stop seeing how many parshmen were standing in the corner of every scene in the first two books.
Dalinar steps up
Dalinar is the heart of the book. His flashbacks tell the story of the Blackthorn, the nickname the people of Alethkar gave him, and they show a man who was once a brutal conqueror, driven by a violence he later spent years trying to put behind him. They run all the way up to the burning of the Rift at Rathalas, where his wife Evi died, and learning what happened to her is hard to read. You see what he did and what it cost him, and it makes his present-day decisions hit harder. He’s also fighting something called the Thrill, which is what makes battle feel so good, and getting past that and making peace with his past is the strongest thread in the book.
At Thaylen City, Odium pushes him to give up his pain and guilt, and he refuses and becomes a Bondsmith, bonded to the Stormfather. It’s the moment where he goes from a man the other rulers write off as weak to somebody who really impresses me, and that’s the part of the book I’d point people to. He’s also busy trying to build a coalition of nations from Urithiru, the tower city that’s now the one safe place left for the Radiants. I enjoyed him far more here than I had in the earlier books, and I’d say the whole book is worth it for him.
The Radiants, Kaladin and a lot of moving pieces
The Knights Radiant are properly back, with Kaladin as a Windrunner, Shallan as a Lightweaver, Renarin as a Truthwatcher and Dalinar as a Bondsmith, and that’s a big moment for the series. Renarin gets more room than I expected, and his corrupted spren bond comes into focus. Jasnah returns and takes the Alethi throne, and Szeth joins the Skybreakers. The Parshendi side of the story gets its own viewpoints through Venli and Rlain, which is useful for understanding what the singers want and what they’ve lost. There’s a lot of story here and most of it is setting something up.
Some of the threads worked less well for me. Kaladin goes home to Hearthstone and then travels with a group of escaped parshmen, and he comes to see them as people, which is a good idea and gives him something to do. He still feels like a shadow of the character he was in the first book, though. Moash kills Elhokar just as he’s about to swear the First Ideal, and then goes over to the enemy, which is a bleak turn and doesn’t help. It’s a lot of story, and a lot of it didn’t grab me the way the earlier books did.
Shallan, Kholinar and Taravangian
Shallan starts to go annoying and bad for me in this book. She splinters into Veil and Radiant, and the mission to Kholinar goes badly wrong, which ends with the city falling. Kholinar is the Alethi capital, and watching it go is one of the book’s low points for the human side. I can see where they’re trying to take her, but I found her harder to enjoy in this one, and she stopped being someone I looked forward to reading. That was another reason the book flagged for me. It’s the first time in the series I’ve felt that way about one of the main viewpoints.
On the other hand, the details of Taravangian and his gift and curse are extremely interesting. His betrayal, along with Amaram’s, comes out in a way that I found really engaging, and it made me look at a character I’d only half paid attention to in a completely new way. There’s a lot in the last stretch that sets up the rest of the series, and some of it is the best material in the book.
Odium, the Heralds and the wider picture
Away from the main characters, Oathbringer is where the big picture of the series starts to come into focus. Odium is no longer a distant threat but someone who shows up and makes offers, and Thaylen City is where that becomes personal for Dalinar. The Unmade, ancient spren that can corrupt and manipulate people, are part of the world in a way they weren’t before. The Heralds and the Oathpact are explained more, including why the Heralds are the way they are, and there’s a real sense that Sanderson is laying pieces out for the later books. Dalinar’s meeting with Cultivation, who’s another power in this world, was one of the parts that made me curious where it was all going.
I found that interesting, and it’s one of the reasons I’d still call this a good book. It’s also the part where I felt the series asking a lot of me. So many of the threads are there to serve something that hasn’t happened yet that I found it hard to care about each one, which is how I ended up shrugging at a good chunk of the middle. I like a payoff as much as anyone, but I want the stretch to get there to be gripping, and for me this one wasn’t always. That’s the honest answer about why I’ve left it without a score.
I haven’t put a number on this one. It’s got Dalinar, the Everstorm twist and Taravangian’s gift and curse, and those are all things I’d recommend it for. But Kaladin’s continued slide and Shallan going bad, together with a middle stretch that flagged, meant it didn’t grab me the way the first two books did. It’s a good book in a very long series, and I didn’t care about it as much as I wanted to.