Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive #2): Kaladin Starts Second-Guessing Everything

I’m giving Words of Radiance a 4 out of 5, and the reason it isn’t a 5 is one character. I really enjoyed the second Stormlight book, it picks up the threads from The Way of Kings with plenty of room to grow, and most of it 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 the rest of it deserves its due.

Part of why it stings is how much of the first book rested on him. Kaladin dragging Bridge Four out of slavery was the heart of it for me, that ground-level, soldier’s-eye view of a war run by people who never have to carry the bridge, and it’s the same thing I liked so much about John Perry in Old Man’s War, even if the two books couldn’t be further apart in setting. Words of Radiance starts with the bridgemen out of the chasms and into uniform, and it’s well over a thousand pages, so Sanderson gives himself the space to spread the story around a lot more this time. That spreading is where most of the good stuff comes from.

Wit continues to be an interesting character, and while it isn’t obvious yet, he’s set up to play a much bigger role in the Cosmere as a whole. He’s the kind of character you notice more on a reread, popping up with a remark or a piece of advice that seems to know more than it should, and his role grows here so you can feel the story making room for him. Syl is awesome as always, still the funniest thing in the book and somehow also one of the most important, 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, a strange, curious Cryptic who hums whenever something makes sense to him. A con artist called Tyn tries to take her on as an apprentice, which doesn’t end well for Tyn, and from there Shallan 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. A secret society working its own angle behind the great houses is the kind of thing I loved in Dune, and the Ghostbloods have that same feel of knowing more than everyone else in the room. 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 helps that she’s so much more vivid 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, which isn’t something I’d have said about her in book one. She also recognises that Amaram is carrying a Shardblade that belonged to her brother, and she finds out how much further her own Surgebinding goes. After a fall into the chasms she and Kaladin are stuck down there together, with a highstorm coming and a chasmfiend for company, and the two of them sniping at each other until they stop is one of the most fun stretches in the book. 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. In The Way of Kings he was mostly the charming son who kept losing girlfriends, and here he’s got a real plan and the nerve to see it through. By the time he’s betrothed 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 the battle at Narak, 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, mostly because of Eshonai’s chapters. Venli pushes a new form called stormform that can summon destructive storms, and despite the warnings about letting in Voidspren, Eshonai, the Listener who wanted peace, is one of the first to take it. 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, because now the enemy has a face and you’ve watched her lose it.

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 now the bodyguards for House Kholin, which is a big step up from bridge crews, and it puts him in the middle of all the scheming around the king. He publicly accuses Amaram of murder in front of the court, and it doesn’t go the way he wants, since Amaram is too powerful and too well liked, and Kaladin ends up in a cell for his trouble. Dalinar takes it seriously, though, and he later digs into what Amaram has been hiding and confronts him with it. 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 at every turn, turning the other highprinces against Dalinar’s plans whenever he gets the chance, and he’s very good at it. Adolin’s patience with him runs out in the end, and it’s satisfying in a way I didn’t quite expect. Elhokar, the king, is paranoid and difficult, and the book keeps showing you why Kaladin has a hard time respecting him, mostly in the way he treats the people whose job it is to keep him alive. 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 captain of Dalinar’s guard now, he’s stuck in his hatred of Amaram and the lighteyes in general, and when Moash and his new friends start talking about getting rid of King Elhokar, whom Kaladin doesn’t think much of as a ruler, he hesitates instead of shutting it down. That’s when his bond with Syl fades and he loses his powers, which is exactly what should happen to a Windrunner who stops protecting people, and it still hurt to read. 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, the one who’d have run straight at the problem instead of brooding about it.

There’s a payoff, though. When Moash and Graves come for Elhokar, Kaladin stands between them and the king with a broken spear, speaks the Third Ideal, and gets Syl back as a Shardblade along with his Windrunner powers. Later he fights Szeth in the air above the Plains and beats him, in a fight that’s as good as anything in the series so far, with the storms closing in around them. Nale brings Szeth back afterwards, which I didn’t see coming. 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 properly from here on, and I think he might, since the Third Ideal is exactly the lesson he needed.

The rest of the cast

Dalinar gets a good book too. He keeps getting cryptic messages counting down to the Everstorm, he decides to refound 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 those countdown messages were coming from, and Jasnah turns out to have survived by escaping into Shadesmar, turning up again at the very end with Wit waiting for her. Taravangian, with his odd swings between genius and something much weaker, keeps pulling strings in the background, and I don’t trust him at all. Lift turns up in an interlude to give a taste of how much more world there is beyond the Shattered Plains, and her chapter is pure fun. I liked all of it, and that’s a lot of cast to keep track of across a book this size without any of them feeling like padding.

So it’s a 4 out of 5 from me. Shallan, Adolin and the politics are better than anything in the first book, and the only thing holding it back is a hero I spent half of it wanting to shake.

Did Kaladin’s doubts bother you as much as they bothered me, or did the Third Ideal make the whole slump worth it? Tell me in the comments.