penwalla

This book has a 4.66 star rating????

I am bamboozled by this book's popularity. I am flummoxed. I am on the fucking ground in confusion.

Because it sucks.

Behold, my numbered list of complaints (spoilers below!):

1. This book contains a race of black-skinned people who are stupid, docile, and universally slaves. This book also contains other slaves, including our protagonist, but while our protagonist and his slave companions get nuance, depth, and to rail against the injustice they're undergoing, the Parshendi get, uh, none of that. Not even the one who is on Kaladin's crew.

Oh, and there is a second race of black-skinned people who are universally violent warriors, and who are the antagonists, who function mostly as waves of enemies for our heroes to cut through.

And the plot twist at the end of this book? The Parshendi are actually the Voidbringers, i.e. the foretold enemy the protagonists have been investigating all through the book. And oh no! They're integrated into every part of society as slaves! What a horrible danger they pose!

I don't...listen, I know Sanderson defenders are going to say that this all gets addressed in a later book, but this book is 1100 pages long. There's no excuse for not having it addressed in this one. And frankly, I think having a race of slave people who are explicitly black is just a bad look, period, especially because they aren't POV characters and have no narrative agency.

2. This book is about a world where men can't read.

To be exact, this book is about a world where men can't read and somehow the book is not about the implications of that. And somehow, the majority of our POV characters are still men, and somehow, men still hold all the relevant leadership positions, and somehow, our one prominent female POV character's plot line is mostly about her being manipulated. By a man.

All the women in this book, with few exceptions, are just there to read things to men. They're glorified secretaries. Women literally do all the art and science and writing and reading in this world. And yet the protagonists are largely male warriors. The title, The Way of Kings, is from an in-universe book that one of our protagonists is obsessed with, but he CAN'T READ, so he's just having it read to him every evening by officer's wives.

And it's not just that this detail is badly thought out and makes the world feel stupid, it's that the whole book is like that. It feels like Sanderson came up with a bunch of cool ideas for a world and then didn't go any deeper in thinking about the implications. A society in which every man relies on women to read and write for him should be vastly different from our own, and when Sanderson just kind of recreates gender roles in every other way, it feels to me like a massive lack of imagination. The highstorms are a cool concept, but they only become plot relevant, like, twice, so they feel like set dressing instead of a threat. We get mentions of magic being using to create all the food and supplies the army needs, but then the book is largely focused on a few sets of fancy magic armor, as if being able to turn any substance into any other substance wouldn't be a much more impactful magic overall.

It sounds like The Stormlight Archives wiki is probably a lot of fun to read, but you know what isn't? This book.

3. The pacing of this book makes me want to eat my own arm.

First off, there are way too many flashbacks. And more importantly, the flashbacks don't do anything. We have Kaladin's entire backstory, but every one of those flashbacks conveys to us the same information: Kaladin was raised to be a surgeon but wanted to fight. Except for the flashback that gives us his tragic backstory, which we don't need because Sanderson's writing has the subtlety of a brick to the head and it's pretty clear what's happened to Kaladin to make him a slave long before we get the "reveal".

In general, this book makes terrible use of its enormous page count. No character has a good arc. The book spins round and round in circles, as characters ruminate on their designated internal conflict ad nauseum, until very late in the book, where they decide to overcome them so the plot can progress. It absolutely could have been cut down as much as fifty percent.

4. Sanderon's writing is very tedious.

This is the no-assembly furniture of prose. Does it convey information? Sure. Is there an ounce of subtlety? No. Sanderson writes like he thinks context clues are a capital offense. The book spoonfeeds you everything, lest you make the fatal error of trying to interpret the characters without explicit descriptions of all their thoughts and feelings. There's no flourishes, no passages that are fun to read, just a steady flow of utilitarian text.

He also writes some of the least interesting fight scenes I have ever read. His descriptions of combat suck all the tension out of the page. This book opens with an assassination of a king and the book gets bogged down in using Sanderson's specific and clunky magical jargon. I keep seeing Sanderson praised for his hard magic system, but there's nothing magical about this system at all. It's like reading a guide to playing a video game. Except it's 1100 pages long.