essteeyou reviewed Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive, #3)
Interesting story, but a few dropped threads
4 stars
Content warning Some spoilers for major plot points.
I liked Dalinar's arc in this story. It seemed genuine and focused all the way through. It was kind of horrifying and fascinating to go through the flashbacks and see how he truly earned his reputation as The Blackthorn. I found his final act of writing to be quite endearing. He's a good character!
Lots of other stories in this book seemed to get a bunch of attention near the start, and then they'd drop off. I'm specifically thinking of Adolin and Sadeas for a start. Secondly there was the whole Shallan/Veil love triangle with Adolin and Kaladin. Thirdly, and related to the previous one was Shallan's wrestling for control of her personalities. Those three things were important most of the way through the book, and then just kind of fizzled into nothing, or got pushed out to another book in the series, perhaps.
I expected Some kind of thing where Veil did something with Kaladin and forced a fight between Adolin and Kaladin, who were finally getting along. I expected Shallan to lose control of her personalities long-term. I nthe end, she just kind of said to Adolin that she told Veil not to do anything with Kaladin, and Veil agreed, so now Shallan was free to only love Adolin. Two storylines wrapped up in one short conversation where she just says some stuff. Show me, don't tell me.
I found it disappointing that Bridge Four members were barely present for most of the book. Pattern seemed to get short-changed toward the end, barely being mentioned.
There's a lot going on, and the audiobook is like 40 hours long already, so I get that there will be more focus on some things than others to avoid a truly insane length of story, but it felt a little bit disappointing.
Anyway, onto the next one soon!
