Hello all. I’m back with a full review of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I read this book last month, I really enjoyed it, and I’m excited to talk about it with you.
The Way of Kings is epic fantasy of the most epic kind. I’ve never read anything quite so expansive. The closest thing I’ve ever read in scope is Lord of the Rings, and even that focused on the same group of characters. This book is a thousand pages long. I listened to the audiobook, which was forty-five and ahalf hours. So this was also the longest book I’ve ever read (or the longest I can remember reading).
The book is set in a world that is regularly ravaged by deadly storms called high storms. Because of the storms, all plant life, down to grass, has the ability to retreat into rock shells. There are also giant crab things that the humans use to pull wagons and such, and all structures are built to withstand the high storms, because if you’re caught outside in a high storm, you’re dead. Despite their danger, the magic of the world also comes from the high storms. Gemstones left out during a storm will become infused with stormlight. These gemstones are used as currency or as light in the richer houses. Gemstones can also be used to transform one form of matter into another, like stone into smoke. And the backstory of the book is that the world is recovering from the desolations, where monsters called voidbringers attacked humanity and were fought off by the heralds and the knights radiant. The almighty, the heralds, and the knights radiant now form the backbone of the major religion of the book. The knights radiant used magical swords and armor, called shardblades and shardplate, which they left behind when they vanished. Because the knights radiant had a glowing aura and glowing eyes, class in this world is based on eye color. Those with light eyes make up the royalty and nobility, while those with dark eyes form the working class. Finally, there are magical creatures called spren that appear around humans a lot, such as pain spren, creation spren, glory spren, and so on. They’re generally just colored lights, but we do get one sentient wind spren and she is awesome.
The book begins with the assassination of the king of one of the most powerful nations in the world, Alethkar. The Parshendi nation take credit for the assassination, so the Alethi wage war on the Parshendi to avenge their fallen king. The book follows four main storylines, with several other smaller vignets scattered throughout.
First, and my personal favorite, we have Kaladin. Kaladin is a darkeyes soldier who was enslaved and sold to the army of one of the eigh princsome of Alethkar. He winds up as part of a bridge crew in High Prince Sadeas’s army on the shattered plains—a bunch of plateaus divided by deep chasms. Its the bridge crews’ job to carry the bridges for the army to cross the chasms to get to battles with the Parshendi, but Kaladin quickly learns it is also the bridge crews’ job to serve as bait and draw the Parshendi fire away from the army. Determined not to die and not to let any of his crew die, Kaladin becomes the leader of his crew and fights first to win their trust and respect and then to train them to survive. He is accompanied by Syl, an extraordinarily sentient wind spren. When their tactics start to work, and the Parshendi start shooting at the soldiers on the approach instead of the bridge crews, Kaladin is given a severe punishment he is not meant to survive. But he does survive, and he realizes he might have some power of his own, and there’s more to his relationship with the spren Syl than he first thought. So he turns that power to planning his bridge crew’s escape from the war camp.
Next, we have Lady Shallan Davar, a young lighteyes noblewoman whose family is in danger after her father’s death. Shallan hatches a daring plan to become apprenticed to the king’s sister, gain her trust, and then steal her soulcaster, the glove encrusted with gemstones that allows the princess to transform one thing into another. But Shallan is soon sucked into the princess’s studies of the origins of the voidbringers and their connection to the old king’s assassination. And soon (relatively speaking), she realizes that she and the princess are hiding the same secret.
Next, we have High Prince Dalinar, uncle to the current king and brother of the old king who was assassinated. Before he was assassinated, the old king pointed Dalinar to a book called The Way of Kings and told him to follow the codes in the book, which lay out strict protocol for war time. The old king also wanted Dalinar to unite the often fractious high princes of Alethkar. While following the codes and striving to form alliances among the high princes, Dalinar also begins having visions of the desolations of the past and the knights radiant during the high storms. He falls under a lot of scrutiny and his own sons begin questioning his sanity, until Dalinar is left trying to choose between following his own instincts or admitting that he is going mad and abdicating his position.
Finally, and perhaps I should have started with this character, we have Szeth-son-son-Vallano, also known as the assassin in white. You guessed it: he killed the old king of Alethkar. Szeth is truthless, which means (I think) that he must obey anyone who carries his oath stone. Like he’s magically forced to. He also carries a shardblade and has the ability to bind objects to each other for short periods of time, which allows him to do some cool things like reverse gravity and run along the ceiling, and otherwise makes him a really good assassin. As the book progresses, Szeth is drawn into a conspiracy that involves a lot of death, and he carries it out, weeping as he kills noble after noble.
Like I said, this was a really long, complex book, and I am only just beginning to scratch the surface with this description. I do hope this gives you enough to decide if this sounds like something you’d be interested in reading. To help with that decision, let’s dive into what I thought of the book.
I think my favorite part of this book was the characters and the world. The characters were all so different, and the world was so alien but so vivid and intricate, and I really loved all that. It was just so easy to get immersed in this story.
On the other hand, it was long. I won’t say it was a slog, but it was a slow, deliberate march. There was a fair amount of exposition, and the plot was sprawling, as you can see from above. There ar some connections that I didn’t make until I looked up the wikipedia summary to get the spellings of characters’ names right (hint: keep an eye on Wit). As much as I liked the book, I had a hard time getting through it because it was so long and so sprawling. I remember being about six hours from the ending and positive that there was no way all of this was going to come together.
But yes, it did come together, and it was pretty spectacular. It was one of those great moments where I actually let out a horrified “Aha! Oh god!” in the middle of the kitchen.
I do wish, after all that, that the ending had been more of a conclusion. I understand that the book is the first in a series, and I also understand that I have been conditioned by a lot of other books to expect the first book in a series to be a complete story that you can continue if you wish. I’m okay with first books not standing on their own. I really am. But this book was just so long that the fact that it wasn’t a complete story bugged me.
On the other hand, oh my god that ending!
One last thing that drove me nuts was that there were two narrators for the audiobook, and they pronounced a couple characters’ names differently. Like come on, people. Communicate on this stuff.
My overall thoughts are that I really, really liked this book. I don’t think I loved it as much as the first Mistborn book,but it was still really good. I’m not convinced it needed to be as long as it was, and while I liked the ending, I wish it had wrapped up more. I loved the world and the characters, and the ending had me dying for the next book. I’m on the waiting list to get the sequel from the library right now, and I’m hoping to get it soon. I have a feeling it is going to be awesome!
In the meantime, have you read The Way of Kings? What did you think?