Daniel Darabos reviewed The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive, #1)
Review of 'The Way of Kings' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
An expertly crafted book. It is impossible to find any fault in it.
Is it well written? Yes. It is 1,000+ pages long, but still never feels like we get side-tracked, there is never a lull in interest. It absolutely draws you in. (I read it mostly while walking on the street. It is sheer luck that I did not get hurt. The real world did not exist for me.)
Are the characters interesting? Very. The character ideas are fantastic. Nobody is just a hero, or a warrior, or a victim. Our warrior character is also a surgeon. Our "detective" is also an artist. We also have singers, musicians, chefs, engineers. I was hoping that Bridge Four starts a boy band at some point and the rest of the story focuses on their rise to fame. (Unfortunately, not.) The characters also work well for drama. They have well-written motivations and …
An expertly crafted book. It is impossible to find any fault in it.
Is it well written? Yes. It is 1,000+ pages long, but still never feels like we get side-tracked, there is never a lull in interest. It absolutely draws you in. (I read it mostly while walking on the street. It is sheer luck that I did not get hurt. The real world did not exist for me.)
Are the characters interesting? Very. The character ideas are fantastic. Nobody is just a hero, or a warrior, or a victim. Our warrior character is also a surgeon. Our "detective" is also an artist. We also have singers, musicians, chefs, engineers. I was hoping that Bridge Four starts a boy band at some point and the rest of the story focuses on their rise to fame. (Unfortunately, not.) The characters also work well for drama. They have well-written motivations and relatable dilemmas.
Is the setting original? This is Brandon Sanderson. Of course it is original! It is medieval fantasy, but no wizards, no elves, no orcs, no undead, etc. Swords and spears are the only element taken from the standard fantasy template, but even they are presented in novel ways. Chicken meat is an exotic delicacy. Even grass is no longer the same.
Is the plot good? The plot is so grand (spanning thousands of years) that it can be revealed at a decent pace and still fill 10,000+ pages. (This series is planned for 10 volumes, the first two of which are 1,000+ pages.) It is good so far, at least. I think a central theme in the plot is that there are two sides to every story. Were the Knights Radiant heroes or villains? So many mysteries, so much for the reader to try to figure out between books!
Does it break from the privileged white male perspective? It seems okay to me. The races in the book are out of this world, but racial and class tensions are a big theme. One of the main characters (and the focus of the second book) is a woman. There are strict gender roles in the country that is the primary focus of the first book. It is mostly patriarchal, but there are restrictions on the men too (cannot eat sweet food, cannot learn to read). We also get glimpses of other eras where men were allowed to read and women were allowed to fight. I expect the social system and its history will be continuously examined in the series.
And yet I am still left a little unfulfilled. I always feel like this after reading fantasy, but not after reading sci-fi. What is going on?
Sci-fi examines possible futures. It is not an exhaustible set, but I feel like progress can be made. It is a bit like science itself. We will never learn everything (or will we?) but we make progress. Fantasy on the other hand examines alternative magical universes. The set is also not exhaustible, but I do not even feel like progress can be made. This lack of progress is what leaves me unfulfilled.
For a specific example, time-travel stories need to work harder and harder to give the reader something new. In fantasy on the other hand you can always pull out a weird new monster from your hat. It does not get harder. The space of monsters is boundless.
Even so I must give this five stars.
