Books

I’d give Wind and Truth a 2 or a 3, probably, and I’m not thrilled about that. This is the one I really didn’t like in comparison to the others. It’s the book that closes out the first five-book arc of the Stormlight Archive, and I went in wanting it to be the payoff for everything since Rhythm of War. Instead I spent a lot of it frustrated, mainly with what it does to the character I cared about most. There are things I liked, and I’ll get to those, but they’re outweighed for me. Fair warning: this post has spoilers in the second half.

The book covers the ten days before the contest of champions against Odium, whose Shard Taravangian now holds. It’s nearly half a million words, which is bigger than the book before it, and the pressure on it to land was enormous because it’s the end of the first half of the whole Stormlight plan. Dalinar goes into the Spiritual Realm to find out about Honor’s past and the truth about the Recreance. Adolin leads the defence of Azimir. Kaladin travels to Shinovar with Szeth. That’s a big spread of storylines for one book, and it was clear from the start that it was going to be long.

Szeth takes the spotlight

Szeth basically supplants Kaladin, and it feels like Kaladin isn’t really anything anymore. That’s the part I couldn’t get past. Kaladin was my favourite character, and Szeth was the villain, and I don’t know that I really like the new direction. Szeth’s pilgrimage takes centre stage, and while I can see what the book is doing with him, it took the spotlight away from the man I’d been following since the first book. The Szeth we meet here isn’t the Assassin in White of the first book, and the change in him is big.

The storyline takes them to Shinovar, looking for the Herald Ishar and the Honorblades that would put the Oathpact back together. Szeth collects Honorblades from monasteries on the way, and the trip turns into something of a pilgrimage for him. Kaladin goes through the Skybreaker monastery and ends up dueling the Herald Nale, using one of Wit’s stories to get through to him. By the end of it, Szeth speaks his Fifth Ideal and walks away from his Skybreaker oath, choosing to act for himself. Kaladin becomes a Herald, taking Jezrien’s place. That’s the way the book ends his arc, and it isn’t the way I’d have chosen.

Adolin holds Azimir

Adolin gets a good chunk of the book, defending the city of Azimir against Odium’s forces over ten days of escalating battles, and I did like his part of it, since he’s one of the characters who has grown on me the most across the series. He works with the Azish military and ends up becoming friends with the emperor, Yanagawn. At one point he loses his Shardplate to a Thunderclast, and Maya, the spren of his Shardblade, rallies the Deadeyes to help him hold the line. He fights the Fused leader Abidi in a duel on the last day and gets his armour back. It’s ordinary courage, and I think it’s one of the most effective storylines in the book.

It also shows what I wish the rest of the book had done more of. His thread is about holding a line, one day at a time, with people he’s come to care about. It’s specific, and it moves forward on every page. Compared to the long stretches in the Spiritual Realm, it felt a lot more alive. I’d have happily read more of it.

Odium, Jasnah and the wider war

The contest of champions is only part of the war, and the rest of the world keeps fighting while Dalinar and Odium wait. Odium has taken over Taravangian’s body, and he’s good at the politics of it, finding ways around the wording of the contest to take cities from the people defending them. Jasnah sets up the defences in Thaylenah and watches his movements, and she’s the one who spots how he’s working around the rules. Navani goes with Dalinar into the Spiritual Realm, where she acts as an anchor for him. I found the strategic side of it interesting, and there’s a real sense of a global war that’s closing in from all sides.

It’s also where the book felt most like a set of separate stories that I was being asked to keep in my head at once. Jasnah’s war, Adolin’s defence, Shallan’s search, Dalinar’s visions and Kaladin’s trip all run at the same time, and every one of them stops to explain things. I understand why that’s the structure, given that this is meant to close out the arc, but it adds to why the book dragged for me. There’s too much going on at once, and none of it has room to breathe. I kept wanting the book to pick a thread and run with it.

The Recreance, Dalinar and the drag

I did enjoy finding out about the Recreance. It’s been an arc that opened the whole story, and the extra detail helped clear up a lot of questions I’d had for a long time. Shallan and Renarin, along with Rlain, go searching through the Spiritual Realm for Ba-Ado-Mishram, and the Knights’ betrayal turns out to have a more complicated cause than it first appeared. Dalinar and Navani see visions from across the ages too, and the truth about Honor gets uncomfortable. It’s the best part of the book for me, and it does a good job of tying the series’ beginning to where it is now. Answers like that are exactly what I’d been waiting five books for, and I’m glad they finally arrived.

Dalinar’s ending, on the other hand, was simply sad. Spoilers: he gives up what he’s holding rather than win the contest, and it costs him his life as he saves his grandnephew Gavinor. I understand the choice, and it reshapes the series going into the planned time jump, but it wasn’t what I wanted for him. And the book as a whole, while it does answer lots of questions, dragged too much, and there was simply too much fluff overall. Some of those sections in the Spiritual Realm felt undirected to me, and I’d rather it had told me all of this in fewer pages.

Rating: 2 to 3 out of 5. Answering the questions about the Recreance was a good thing, but Szeth taking over from Kaladin, Dalinar’s ending and the amount of padding all worked against it. It’s the one I liked least of the five. I’m still curious where the story goes next, but this wasn’t the ending to the first arc that I was hoping for.

I’m giving Rhythm of War a 3.5 out of 5. There are some good elements in it, but I’m still struggling with the pace, the characters and the actual story, and that’s what pulled it down for me. It’s the fourth book in the series, following Oathbringer, and I went in hoping the middle of the story would pick up speed. It didn’t quite do it for me. The setting is a year into the war, with Dalinar and Jasnah fighting in Emul while Shallan and Adolin head to Shadesmar on a mission to the honorspren, and there’s a lot of moving parts in play. I’ll take the parts that bothered me one at a time, because there are a few and they’re all connected.

It’s also another enormous book, well over a thousand pages, and I think that’s part of the problem. When a book is this long, the pace matters more, and I kept waiting for the story to tighten up. There’s good material in there, which I’ll get to, but I felt like I was wading through a lot of it on the way. That’s the honest feeling I came away with, and it’s why this is a 3.5 and not something higher.

Kaladin, the first psychiatrist

The first problem is Kaladin. He was a spearman without compare, and now he’s the first psychiatrist? That seems like a stretch to me, and I struggled with it. A year into the war he’s been relieved of duty by Dalinar because of his battle shock, after a bad encounter with Moash in Hearthstone, and he ends up as something like the first therapist on Roshar, helping people with mental illness. That isn’t the character I fell for in the first book, and every time it came up I found myself less interested in him than I’d been.

To be fair, there’s a real story in it. Kaladin’s depression gets worse and worse, and when Urithiru falls to the Fused, he stays conscious while the other Radiants around him are knocked out. He ends up rallying a resistance, and the fighters mark themselves with the shash brand in his honour. After Moash kills Teft and Teft’s spren with anti-Stormlight, Kaladin hits the lowest point of the book, and a vision from Dalinar shows him Tien. He comes out of it by swearing the Fourth Ideal, accepting that he can’t protect everyone, and he rescues his father from the tower. I can see what the book is doing with that, and I’m not saying it’s badly done. It just isn’t the Kaladin I wanted.

The tower that was found and lost

The sequence with the tower is the part that struck me as simply sad. The singers take Urithiru by suppressing the tower’s defences, and most of the Radiants inside are knocked out. Only a few are left to resist from inside, including Kaladin and Navani, who’s a scholar and not a fighter. They’d only just found the place, and with all of the different Shardbearers and Radiants around, losing it almost immediately felt like a waste. It made the whole Radiant order feel a lot less powerful than it had been built up to be, and I found that hard to get past.

Navani ends up forced into research with the Fused scholar Raboniel, who lets her keep working, and that’s where the anti-Light discovery comes from. She works out that Honor, Cultivation and Odium each have their own kind of light, and that they can be mixed into new things, including something that can kill both Fused and spren for good. She also bonds the Sibling, the tower’s spren, and becomes a Bondsmith. It’s a good thread, and the science of it is interesting. But Moash keeps turning up, and the stakes of all of it got muddied for me by how much was going on at the same time.

Shallan, Adolin and Shadesmar

Shallan and Adolin are off in Shadesmar on a mission to the honorspren stronghold, Lasting Integrity, while all of that is happening. The Ghostbloods task Shallan with killing a man called Restares, who turns out to be a Herald, and she refuses. She finally starts healing from her fractured identity, merging her personas, and she has to face the memory she’d hidden about what she did to her first spren. It’s a strong way to close out her part of the book. Adolin stands trial before the honorspren, who want to know whether humans can be trusted with a bond, and his Shardblade’s spren Maya ends up testifying on his behalf. It’s a good section, and it’s one of the places where I felt the book was really working.

The trouble is how little connection that has to the rest of the story. It felt like a separate book running alongside the tower, and I kept having to switch gears between them. That’s part of my problem with the pace. Both threads are fine individually, but the book doesn’t always seem to know which one it wants me to care about more.

Dalinar, Jasnah and Venli

Away from the tower, Dalinar leads Szeth, Jasnah, who’s the Alethi queen now, and a lot of Radiants to the front lines in Emul. When he senses something wrong at Urithiru, he goes looking for Ishar, the Bondsmith Herald, hoping for guidance. The Herald turns out to be mad, attacks him, and runs, though he has a brief moment of clarity where he asks for help. Dalinar also grows closer to the Stormfather, gaining the ability to ride highstorms and to slow time so he can talk with the people he’s bonded to. It’s a cool idea, and I liked seeing his powers grow, though it adds to the feeling that there’s a lot of material being set up for later.

Venli’s storyline is the other one I found interesting. Her flashbacks show how she brought the Fused and the new forms into the world, and in the present she’s secretly working with the singer Leshwi to overthrow most of the Fused. Eventually she swears her Second Ideal and becomes a Radiant herself, after reuniting with listeners who fled the original Everstorm. There’s also a moment for Eshonai, who gets a brief Radiance before she dies, riding a storm with the Stormfather, which is a fitting end for a character who always wanted to see one. That’s a thread I wouldn’t have expected to care about, and I did.

The Fused, the secrets and Taravangian

The Fused, with their memories of the past, might be a bit overpowered compared to people who’ve only just found out they have a power. At the same time, it feels like there aren’t enough of them to make the outsized difference they show. I couldn’t quite square those two things while I was reading. It’s a bit annoying, too, when the entities that have the answers keep hiding things, like the Stormfather and the Sibling, because it only causes more problems. If they’d said what they knew, a lot of what goes wrong in this book wouldn’t have gone wrong.

There are good things as well. Venli becomes a Radiant, Dalinar makes a wager with Odium for a ten-day contest of champions, and Taravangian takes up Odium’s Shard at the end. I did like how some of these pieces set up the next book. It’s just that I got there feeling tired from the journey.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5. Some good elements, but I’m still struggling with the pace, the characters and the story. Kaladin as the first psychiatrist was a stretch, losing the tower so fast was sad, and the entities keeping secrets is a bit annoying. It’s a solid middle chapter and not much more than that.

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.

I loved The Way of Kings the first time I read it, and I’ve loved it every time since, and that’s been more than a few. I gave it a 5 out of 5 a long time ago and I’d give it a 5 again today without a second’s thought. It’s also where my whole Sanderson habit started, because even though it came out well after the Mistborn books, it was the first of his I ever picked up. I didn’t know how much he wrote, or really anything about him at the time, which probably helped, because I went in with no expectations at all and came out the other side wanting everything he’d ever put on paper.

I got my copy straight from Tor back when I was super active posting, which was a really cool moment, and that was before Sanderson started work on The Wheel of Time. He’d go on to finish that series, and I wrote about his first contribution in The Gathering Storm, but this book is what made me pay attention to him in the first place. If you’ve read my earlier review of this book, this one is really a reread take, written after going back through it again with the rest of the series behind me. I wrote about the first Mistborn book around the same era too. Long story short, this is by far the best book in the Stormlight Archive, and I’ve read enough of them now to say that with confidence.

Kaladin and Bridge Four

Kaladin was easily my favourite character, and it all starts here. He’s a surgeon’s son who goes to war to protect his younger brother Tien, and he watches Tien die anyway, which shapes everything he does afterwards. He earns a Shardblade through combat and gives it away rather than keep it, and the lighteyed lord he trusted, Amaram, betrays him and has him branded a slave to cover up the theft. That’s how he ends up on the Shattered Plains carrying bridges for Sadeas, where the bridgemen are basically there to die, sent ahead of the army as the first thing the Parshendi archers shoot at. The flashbacks that explain why Kaladin is the way he is are woven in at just the right times, so you understand what he’s carrying and why he doesn’t trust the men who give the orders.

The thing I love is how he pulls Bridge Four back from the brink. He starts with a crew that has given up, a bunch of men who are waiting to be killed, and he drags them into something better by being smart and stubborn. He changes how they carry the bridges, works out how to keep them alive, and treats them like people in a place where no one else does. Rock, Teft, Sigzil, Moash and the rest turn from names in a crowd into characters I care about, and watching them become a real crew is a big part of why I love this book.

The moment that I think about most is the highstorm. After a creative but failed attempt with a bridge goes wrong, an angry Sadeas has Kaladin beaten and tied out in the open with a storm coming in, and he isn’t supposed to survive it. He does. And afterwards he starts to find that he can do things he shouldn’t be able to, pulling Stormlight out of the spheres people use as money and getting stronger, faster and able to heal. That’s when Syl, the honorspren who’s been following him around, starts to make sense. It’s an iconic moment, and it sets up the whole rest of the series.

Dalinar, the visions and the Tower

Dalinar Kholin, the Blackthorn, is the other spine of the book. He’s a highprince and a legendary warrior who’s starting to question the way Alethkar fights its war, and he’s having visions during the highstorms that show him the ancient Knights Radiant. The other highprinces think those visions mean he’s losing his mind, and his own son Adolin worries about it too. Dalinar follows the old Codes anyway, which makes him look weak to the men around him, and his honour is exactly what ends up being used against him. The voice in the visions keeps telling him to unite them, and he doesn’t entirely know who they are or how to do it.

The Tower is where it all comes together. Dalinar plans with Sadeas to trap the Parshendi, and partway through the battle Sadeas abandons him, leaving the Kholin army cut off. This is where Kaladin’s new powers matter. He channels Stormlight to shield his men from arrows and then charges the enemy, which lets Dalinar’s people get out alive, and it’s one of the best sequences in the book. Afterwards Dalinar confronts Sadeas and trades his Shardblade for two thousand bridgemen, which I love as a choice for a man who could have had revenge.

Roshar, Shallan and Szeth

Roshar itself is a big part of why this book works. It’s a world of highstorms that sweep across the land on a schedule, and everything from the plants to the architecture has adapted to them, with spren hovering around every emotion and object and Shardblades and Shardplate turning ordinary soldiers into something else. The whole war on the Shattered Plains is fought over gemhearts from the giant chasmfiends that live in the chasms, which gives the fighting a strange, almost sporting shape. Sanderson hands you all of this a bit at a time, so it feels like you’re learning a place instead of being handed a manual, and I never felt lost even when there was a lot going on.

Shallan is the third main storyline. She’s a minor noble from a struggling family who schemes her way into becoming Jasnah Kholin’s ward, with a plan to steal Jasnah’s Soulcaster and save her family’s fortune. Along the way she befriends a young priest called Kabsal, and she works out that both she and Jasnah can Soulcast without a device, which isn’t supposed to be possible. Jasnah is a scholar who believes the Parshendi are connected to the ancient Voidbringers, and I found her research threads compelling because they hint at how big the real conflict is going to be.

Szeth, the Assassin in White, is the fourth thread, and he’s the one who kills King Gavilar in the prologue. He’s a Shin exile carrying a Shardblade and powers that let him bend gravity, and he obeys whoever holds his Oathstone, which means he’s made to kill people he’d rather not. Later we learn that one of his masters is Taravangian, the gentle-seeming king of Kharbranth. Even Wit, the king’s jester, gets a role at the end when a figure appears at Kholinar’s gates with a warning about what’s coming. Adolin, Elhokar and the other Kholins fill in the wider cast, and every one of them has enough going on that I wanted more of them.

So many questions, so few answers

The odd thing is how many mysteries and questions it raises and how few answers it gives. You’d think that would leave me frustrated by the end. It really didn’t. There’s the Assassin in White, Dalinar’s visions, the Shardblades, the spren, the Knights Radiant who are clearly on their way back, and every one of them is a hook rather than a hole. I finished the book wanting to know more and not irritated at being left hanging.

The last vision, with the voice behind them finally explained, sends you straight into the second book. It’s definitely a hefty tome, and I won’t pretend otherwise, so give yourself some time with it. Kaladin alone makes it worth the effort. But I can’t recommend it enough, and if I hadn’t already given it a 5 earlier, I’d definitely do so now.

Rating: 5 out of 5. It’s the best book in the series by a distance, and I’ve loved it every single time I’ve read it. Kaladin is my favourite character, the iconic scenes are all here, and it left me with a pile of mysteries I was happy to be left with. Pick it up if you haven’t.