Target: Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings
Profile: Epic Fantasy
I read The Way of Kings back in 2011 and never got around to posting a review. I had gotten a lot of reading done on trains in the middle of June of that year and totally overshot my ability to review things. I was going to write a review post it as a Lost Battle, but when I started I found I couldn’t answer many of the questions that I use to seed these reviews. So I re-read the damn thing.
The Way of Kings is a pretty good book. It’s a bit long and takes ages to get to the point. It does, however, follow in the best traditions of epic fantasy, capturing your imagination and attention. The worldbuilding is top-notch and the protagonists are strong and well developed. The book makes you crave more, even as it stretches out what could have been a brisk prologue story into a mammoth novel.
The story takes place on the world of Roshar, a land buffeted by regular, severe weather systems called highstorms. The majority of Roshar is adapted to these heavy inundations and resembles an enormous intertidal zone. Humans here eke out a living from the rain-scoured rocks. At some point in the distant past, human civilization underwent a series of collapses that left nearly every nation technologically backward and socially aggressive. Kingdoms war with each other for the fabulously powerful Shards, relics from the distant past that can determine the course of history.
Cannonball Read V 
Yeah, the flashbacks were probably the one thing I could have done without. But the rest of it blew my brains out my ears.
Interestingly, they bothered me more the second time around. The first time I got through it, I had read the whole thing in something like two days (not healthy), and my biggest issue was the whole prologue-feel thing. But the second time… ugh. All Kaladin, all the time does not a happy Fofo make.
Two days! Holy shit. It took me seven. Didn’t your butt get tired?
My favorite parts were the Kaladin brigeman parts, and every time the narrative moved away from that I got upset, including those blasted flashbacks, which were teasing me with Kaladin, but not the Kaladin I wanted.
Yah. I had two days of long train rides back to back. It was rough.
Shallan used my favorite character by far, but after reading The Hero of Ages I’ve gotten very leery of Sanderson’s academic subplots and characters. I just know she’s going to make me very angry, probably in book three.
I’m reading Mistborn next, and I’m worried reading this one first will ruin it for me. We’ll see.