WHEW finally. Sanderson does it again with another fantastic, fast-paced, intriguing installment of the Stormlight Archive. If you liked Way of Kings, you'll get everything you wanted and more in Word of Radiance. Many of my same praises and criticisms hold true for this book, but both dialed a bit more up to 11. The setting and world building is just chef's kiss. I can't get over how in love with this world I am. The cultures and people are all fully realized and interesting. I really enjoyed learning more about the Parshendi culture. Sanderson did a phenomenal job at creating both a rich yet wholly alien society that was a joy to learn about. The characters are written well and have very solid arcs, even if I didn't find some of their voices to be fully distinct.

I'd say my biggest complaint is with pacing. Way of Kings had some minor pacing issues, but I couldn't help but feel that the pacing was very lopsided in this book. For being almost 1100 pages, it is almost comical how much action was packed into the final 50 pages. I found many chapters in the beginning and middle of the book to be needlessly drawn out and uninteresting. In fact, entire chapters likely could have been cut without anything critical lost. The final 100 pages had a lot of non-stop action, which was great and very much understandable for any adventure book. But the final pages also had a TON of exposition that I feel would have been better suited peppered throughout than offloaded all at once. It was jarring to switch between fast paced scenes with long exposition conversations that didn't need to occur in the final pages. For this reason, some of the character decisions felt rushed and undeveloped at the end when it could have easily been addressed in the slower chapters earlier on.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed this book. I supposed I was just expecting more of an improvement on the issues that the first book had. Regardless, I'm super excited to dive into the next one!