Review: The Way of Kings

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'll be honest, it took me a long time to really become sold on this book (which doesn't exactly help given that it's over a thousand pages).

Brandon Sanderson's greatest strength (world-building) is perhaps also in effect a contributor to one of his main weaknesses, in that he has to spend a lot of time setting up the moving pieces in his ever-expanding Cosmere universe before the worthwhile moments can actually happen. But until you're able to see what or where he's building things towards, it's easy to get lost in the details and then start wondering how much of what you're reading actually matters, which becomes a compounding issue the longer your book is-- and for the record, I still have no idea wtf was up with more than half the interludes in this book even after finishing it.

The characters are all right if not a bit difficult to follow, or at least in audiobook form, especially if you get made-up names confused easily (seriously, could he not come up with more distinct sounding names for Dalinar, Elhokar, Gavrilar, Adolin, and Renarin). Kaladin gets fleshed out the most through backstory in this book, even though his characterization ends up feeling a bit... vanilla (I've probably seen way too many stories with protagonists obsessed with protecting people, especially in anime/manga). Shallan is annoying at times but probably has the most interesting backstory exposition in her segments apart from the obvious moments in Dalinar's story. Sveth's story was the most captivating overall, but he also turned up the least so eh.

It wasn't really until the last third of this book when I really started getting invested in what was going on with the backstory enough to want to keep reading the rest of the series, which I've heard gets progressively better after this one. That said, I honestly did find some of the progression here boring at times, but I'm hoping that enough of the world has been set up at this point for me to actually want to pay attention as things go on in subsequent books, so I'm progressing with cautious enthusiasm here. But we'll see.