Published about a year ago, the sheer size of this novel ensured that it waited until there was ample time to read. Any part one of a fantasy series that tips the scale at 1000+ pages is going to demand a certain degree of dedication. And all too often this dedication is doomed to disappointment. Every now and then, it is a joy to be proved wrong.
Forget the Mistborn saga, this is a brand new and fresh fantasy series, set in a brand new world with a very different history and culture. The blurb says ‘Roshar is a world of stone and storms’ and all life has to deal with this harshness. Plants retract into stone protections, floodplains are scarred with narrow canyons a hundred feet deep, and humanity is as harsh and brutal as the environment. This book tells the story of one poor slave, one highprince, and a young girl with a deep love of learning. Kaladin, the slave, is sentenced to carry portable bridges for the army; and the bridge has to go first into battle. Dalinar, the highprince, fears he is going insane and will be unable to protect his family. Shallan, the girl, is determined to rescue her family from shame and humiliation by a carefully planned theft.
The book took a long time to capture my interest. First, it was physically uncomfortable to hold the book for long periods of time. If there was ever an argument for an ebook, this is it. I could only read for 10-15 minutes at a time, and that is hard to establish a fantasy realm in tiny bites like that.
Secondly, in the first chapters Sanderson spent a lot of pages establishing the history of the world, the Shardbearers and the Radiant Knights. At that stage, I simply didn’t care. I would suggest that these ‘backstories’ would have been better placed in an appendix. Once the reader gets to Kaladin and Shallan, it is much easier to connect to the characters and ‘get into’ the story. Once the Radiant Knights and Shardblades become important to the story, the backstory could have been included as another interlude or referred to the appendix.
As in his Mistborn series, Sanderson tells the story best when he looks from the point of view of a common man, or maybe uncommon man in Kaladin’s case. For much of this book, I felt Dalinar was an old man, rapidly losing touch with reality. In part three I was happy to see his name left off the front page. But eventually he came into his own and I’ll admit that this morning I had great difficulty putting the book down during his final battle scene and the aftermath.
Naturally, the ultimate judgement of an introductory book for a fantasy series is in how it sets up the second book. The worst in the genre rush to a conclusion, leaving the second book to shift all the chess pieces into place for the grand finale. But here Sanderson spends the final 100 or so pages resetting the board for the next round.
So the real question is, When and where do we get it?
