eBook, 1137 pages
English language
Published by Tor Books.
Wow! What an awesome book! I finished it and wanted to immediately re-read it.
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.
I've been reading Sanderson for a while now, and every time I discuss him with my friends, they say that I should "start with Way of Kings". So I finally decided to pick this book up and check out what the big deal is.
You - reader - should read this book. It's fantastic. Read it if:
1. You are a lover of fantasy
2. You love complex worlds and story arcs that span across time / place and circumstance.
3. You are in it for the long haul and don't mind huge books.
This book is huge, even by Sanderson standards, but it moves along at a rapid pace and is almost un-put-down-able.
Great story and characters. Yes, like others have said, there are moments when the details and setup outweigh the action. Overall, a good book to begin with for this genre. I will read the sequels, but maybe not his other works...they are quite the hefty tomes after all.
I enjoyed this book a lot. I will recommend it to others. My brain was quite a bit muddled by the beginning of the book, which is the fault of my brain. I am excited to see what more there is.
Really good start to what looks like an amazing fantasy series. Loses a star for cringey dialogue (Shallan, Wit), but it's not particularly worse than any other "witty" Sanderson character (see Wayne or Lightsong). Pacing pretty good for such a long book, could have tightened it up in the middle but no complaints - I still ate it up. Ending was spectacular.
Three words to describe this book: Full of colors.
If "the purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon", this books certainly succeeds. However more than the questions themselves, the way that those are presented is what makes the " Way of Kings" shine with an intricate pattern of light.
It's rare that I agree so wholeheartedly with the general consensus on a book or writer, but I have to admit: Brandon Sanderson is one hell of a writer.
Way of Kings is almost an almost perfect epic fantasy. It manages to combine the grand, world spanning the events of Jordan the
political machinations of Martin, the adventure of Tolkien and the unique worldbuilding he's already known for; and yet this work is deeply original.
It's fast paced, exciting, and populated with well developed, complex characters. I could hardly stand to put it down.
My only qualm is a certain, shall we say, recurring awkwardness in gender relationships. The very stark division in roles for the genders portrayed here is interesting, and a bold attempt to address gender in fantasy...and yet, and yet, there is still this "women are unfathomable creatures" undercurrent that so often trips up men who try …
It's rare that I agree so wholeheartedly with the general consensus on a book or writer, but I have to admit: Brandon Sanderson is one hell of a writer.
Way of Kings is almost an almost perfect epic fantasy. It manages to combine the grand, world spanning the events of Jordan the
political machinations of Martin, the adventure of Tolkien and the unique worldbuilding he's already known for; and yet this work is deeply original.
It's fast paced, exciting, and populated with well developed, complex characters. I could hardly stand to put it down.
My only qualm is a certain, shall we say, recurring awkwardness in gender relationships. The very stark division in roles for the genders portrayed here is interesting, and a bold attempt to address gender in fantasy...and yet, and yet, there is still this "women are unfathomable creatures" undercurrent that so often trips up men who try to write women characters.
A great start to The Stormlight Archive decalogue... Can't wait to see the rest of the series unfold...
I wanted to like this a lot more than I actually did. There are so many interesting characters in this book that I want to know more about. Unfortunately this is also the book's biggest weakness. We spend the first NINE HUNDRED pages swapping between he viewpoints of five interesting characters. I could handle that, but combine it with randomly inserted flashback chapters from several of those characters viewpoints and it feels like there's nothing holding the story together. When you finally make it past that 900 pages mark, some of the characters start to meet; while others are involved in very, very interesting reveals of information. Unfortunately with only 107 pages left, there's not enough pages left to really give a full payoff for all the scenes you've read through to get to this point.
Or maybe I'm just a tad upset that he book ended so soon; with …
I wanted to like this a lot more than I actually did. There are so many interesting characters in this book that I want to know more about. Unfortunately this is also the book's biggest weakness. We spend the first NINE HUNDRED pages swapping between he viewpoints of five interesting characters. I could handle that, but combine it with randomly inserted flashback chapters from several of those characters viewpoints and it feels like there's nothing holding the story together. When you finally make it past that 900 pages mark, some of the characters start to meet; while others are involved in very, very interesting reveals of information. Unfortunately with only 107 pages left, there's not enough pages left to really give a full payoff for all the scenes you've read through to get to this point.
Or maybe I'm just a tad upset that he book ended so soon; with so many more things I want to know and the author is brilliantly leaving me wanting more. shrug What I can say is I enjoyed it and I will be picking up he sequel whenever it is published.
I hesitated to read this because the series is not complete and because I had started to read a sample and wasn't all that impressed with the beginning. This held true for the first 20% of the book. I really was expecting more from Sanderson after reading Mistborn and the WoT finale.
There were 3+ story lines plus the prologue and for a long time no hint what they have to do with each other - for a new series ... difficult. I couldn't grasp the world visually (there are drawings later on, that helped): everything made of Stone and a bunch of Crustacean animals? Also I didn't really like the characters: some hopeless slave with suicidal thoughts, a thieving dishonest scholar with a talent for drawing & a paranoid king and his overly honorable uncle with delusional visions of the past plus his son who wants to send dad …
I hesitated to read this because the series is not complete and because I had started to read a sample and wasn't all that impressed with the beginning. This held true for the first 20% of the book. I really was expecting more from Sanderson after reading Mistborn and the WoT finale.
There were 3+ story lines plus the prologue and for a long time no hint what they have to do with each other - for a new series ... difficult. I couldn't grasp the world visually (there are drawings later on, that helped): everything made of Stone and a bunch of Crustacean animals? Also I didn't really like the characters: some hopeless slave with suicidal thoughts, a thieving dishonest scholar with a talent for drawing & a paranoid king and his overly honorable uncle with delusional visions of the past plus his son who wants to send dad into retirement? ... Not to forget the "Assassin in White" compelled to kill ... and the loads of humanoid Darth Maul crawfish (or so I imagine the Parshendi) None of them are particularly sympathetic. I really had a hard time identifying with any of the characters at first.
So yes I gave the book still 4 stars, because last night I read until 4a.m. to finish the last chapters, because sometime around a third of the book things started making sense, because characters became intriguing and because I really wanted to see how Kaladin was going to ... well I won't spoil anything. I finally started getting a grasp of the world ... I have to deduct one star for the weak beginning but I can now see where this epic is going and it is epic.
So give it a try ... I am really looking forward to reading the sequel.
Re-read this April 2015. I have to update my rating to 5 stars. After reading Words of Radiance and this one again.
Like all first books of a long series - with new worlds, secrets, and rules - Way of Kings was a little slow-moving in the beginning as everything was laid out. And, at first, I felt there were quite a few too many characters to keep straight.
But once the story started to progress, it REALLY took off. And when the various stories started to point towards each other, everything just fell into place. I really like that the story didn't follow the usual structure of similar fantasy stories. A few things happened that I either didn't anticipate or that went the opposite of what I was thinking was going to happen. Really kept me guessing up until the end.
I would definitely recommend and I cannot wait for the next book in the series.
Way of Kings was such a phenomenal book. It's the first of a series so be prepared to want more at the end.
Sanderson does such a great job of setting up the world of Roshar, along with the characters of Dalinar, Kaladin, and Shallan. The conflict between the Alethi and Parshendi makes up the bulk of the book, and serves as another place where Sanderson's great portrayals of leadership, and of the human experience come through.
Without giving spoilers, I can't say too much more about the plot, but it really is a book to grab, even though it takes some time to get through at 1000 pages. The events of this first book to the Stormlight Archive series just truly need to be experienced by anyone who enjoys a nice epic fantasy.
Loved it! Full review here: www.andrlik.org/blog/2010/oct/02/review-way-kings-brandon-sanderson/
I'm going to have to do a bit of thinking before I'm ready to write a proper review for this. Just finished it, it was great, just needs more thought.
