I’ve enjoyed Brandon Sanderson’s work completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series; he’s nailed the town and narrative stye of Jordan while simultaneously taming many of the author’s meandering story lines. I was eager to see how his own books read, and decided to pick up the The Way of Kings audiobook. It’s a big book — 45 hrs and 37 mins in audio form, 1280 pages in print — and it took me most of August and September to listen to (and that’s with a 16-hour round trip car ride to Lake Champlain thrown in).
I loved that Sanderson’s crafted a non-standard fantasy world. Like his earlier Mistborn books he’s eschewed standard magic to create something wholly his own. In The Way of Kings magic of a kind exists but it’s tied to an epic force known as stormlight. This light, generated by massive storms that wrack the world, can be trapped in gemstones and then used to fuel “shardplate” — essentially medieval power armor — as well as mystical abilities that can manipulate gravity and transform physical objects.
The book uses the same rotating point-of-view approach of The Wheel of Time and A Song of Fire and Ice to tell the stories of Dalinar Kholin, a high prince whose people are fighting an unending war, Kaladin, a slave who fights in the self-same war, and Shallan, a woman who’s seeking to restore her faltering royal house. Each POV is broken up by short vignettes examining other parts of the world.
I could have skipped all of Kaladin’s self-pitying flashbacks, and I’d have preferred he introduced us to his downtrodden hero at the time he joined the war, rather than his initial time as a slave. That said I can’t argue with the destination; Sanderson expertly brought these threads together in a satisfying conclusion that expertly sets up the next book … which I’ll be sure to read when it’s released in late 2013.