The Stormlight Archive

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.

I’m giving Words of Radiance a 4 out of 5, and the reason it isn’t a 5 is one character. I still really enjoyed the second Stormlight book, and it picks up the threads from The Way of Kings with plenty of room to grow, and a lot of this book is genuinely good. But it’s also the book where Kaladin’s weaknesses start to show, and after the way I felt about him in the first one, that’s a real pity. I’ll come back to that, because there’s a lot to get through first and I want to give the rest of it its due.

Wit continues to be an interesting character, and while it isn’t evident yet, he serves to play a significantly greater role in the Cosmere as a whole. He’s the kind of character you notice more on a reread, the one popping up with a remark or a piece of advice that seems to know more than it should. His role grows here and you can feel the story making room for him. Syl is awesome as always, and Shallan and Adolin both get a lot better, so the cast is stronger overall even with my one big complaint.

Shallan, Jasnah and the Ghostbloods

Shallan starts to become a lot more interesting as a character in this one. The book opens with Jasnah apparently murdered at sea, and Shallan carries on with her mentor’s research and with her own spren, Pattern, who’s a strange, curious Cryptic that hums whenever something makes sense to him. She crosses paths with a con artist called Tyn and ends up taking her identity, and from there she infiltrates the Ghostbloods under the name Veil, which is a fun way for a character who started as a scheming girl with a sketchbook to get into real danger. The aim is to find out about the lost city of Urithiru and what the Voidbringers really are. It’s a lot of plot for one character to carry, and it’s helped by how much more vivid she is on the page than she was before.

Her flashbacks are where the book digs into who she is, and where she finally admits what she did to her mother. It gives her far more weight than she had, and it made me want to keep reading her sections. She also recognises that Amaram is carrying a Shardblade that belonged to her brother, and she discovers she has Surgebinding abilities of her own. After a fall into the chasms that Sadeas orchestrates, she and Kaladin survive together and form a bond. By the end, on Dalinar’s expedition to the centre of the Plains, she’s the one who opens the Oathgate to Urithiru.

Adolin, the duels and the Parshendi

Adolin also becomes a better character in this book. He’s Dalinar’s son and he duels other lighteyes to win Shards for his father, including a fight against four Shardbearers at once that goes badly and then very right, and he gets a much better showing by the end than he did in the first book. By the time he’s engaged to Shallan, his storyline and hers run together, and he has a proper place in the main plot instead of being a supporting piece. Later he takes on Eshonai in battle during the Everstorm assault, and he ends up confronting Sadeas’s repeated treachery directly, which ends in a way I won’t spoil.

The Parshendi side of the story is more interesting than it was in the first book too. Venli discovers a new form called stormform that can summon destructive storms, and despite the warnings about letting in Voidspren, Eshonai, the Listener who wanted peace, becomes the first to transform. It changes her, turning her eyes red and making her aggressive, and she takes over Narak and tries to bring the whole of her people along. It’s a tragic end for a character I’d come to like, and it makes the war on the Shattered Plains feel a lot more complicated than it did before.

Politics, Amaram and Sadeas

A lot of the book is politics, and I enjoyed that more than I expected to. Kaladin and his bridgemen are named the royal bodyguards for House Kholin, which is a big step up from being bridge crews, and it puts him in the middle of all the scheming around the king. He publicly accuses Amaram of treason, and it doesn’t go the way he wants, since Amaram is too powerful and too well liked. Dalinar takes it seriously, though, and he later confronts Amaram in private and exposes what he’s been hiding. It’s a good example of how Dalinar handles things compared to Kaladin, and of how the two of them pull in different directions even when they want the same outcome.

Sadeas is still the problem. He keeps working against the Kholins, and the chasm fall that throws Kaladin and Shallan together is down to him. Adolin ends up confronting Sadeas’s treachery directly in the end, and he also throws away his father’s Shardblade, Oathbringer, which I thought was a neat moment for a character who’d been all about winning them. Elhokar, the king, is paranoid and difficult, and the book keeps showing you why Kaladin has a hard time respecting him. There’s a lot of intrigue and I liked watching it all come to a head, even though it’s part of why Kaladin gets so stuck in his own head.

Kaladin’s turn

Here’s my complaint. In the first book Kaladin was basically a caricature of honour, and I loved him for it. In this book he’s constantly complaining and second-guessing himself and his path. He’s now captain of Dalinar’s guard, and he’s stuck in his hatred of Amaram and the lighteyes, and his bond with Syl nearly breaks when he hesitates to protect King Elhokar, whom he doesn’t think much of as a ruler. It’s a pity, because he was such an amazing character in book one, and this is where his weakness starts to show. I kept wishing for more of the man from the first book.

There’s a payoff, though. When Moash and a group of assassins corner him, Kaladin speaks the Third Ideal to protect Elhokar, gets Syl back as a Shardblade and becomes a full Windrunner. Later he fights Szeth in the air above Narak and beats him, in a fight that’s as good as anything in the series. Nale brings Szeth back afterwards. Meanwhile the whole book builds towards the Everstorm, a storm that circles the planet the opposite way to the highstorm and turns any parshmen it touches. I hope Kaladin redeems himself from here on, and I think he might.

The rest of the cast

Dalinar gets a good book too. He receives cryptic messages counting down to the Everstorm, he decides to restore the Knights Radiant, and in the assault on Narak he bonds the Stormfather and becomes a Bondsmith. Renarin reveals he’s a Truthwatcher, which explains where Dalinar’s messages were coming from, and Jasnah turns out to have survived by escaping into Shadesmar where she meets Hoid. Taravangian, with his odd swings between genius and something much weaker, keeps pulling the strings in the background. Lift turns up in an interlude to give a taste of how much more world there is, and I liked all of it.