I finished it. I really really liked it. I think it was in the same field as Way Of Kings.

I'm gonna do a re-read once the holidays start.

 

I've completed the book too. It's fine, not as boring as Oathbringer, but imo below the level of the first two books.

 

Is there adequate amounts of Lift?

Please say yes.

 

In a way I read it before it was released

 

Spoiler

You were partially right on most of these and it does make me reasses the book for the worse

Lift is there, but not prominent. Too many important things happening/encyclopedia dumps. I'd say she played a greater role in the previous story.

 

Mind giving me a spoilered summary or DM what I got wrong/right?

 

While there was one subplot I did not really care for, I think that overall, this might actually be the volume I like most so far. To be fair, the aspects I enjoyed may well be the reasons others will like it less.

Planning to reread all the other Cosmere books now. It's been a while and I'm curious if I am able to spot any of the connections between them that are supposedly in there.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cosmere/co...ished_all_cosmere_books_what_are_the/dzf82qi/

 

Thanks! I'll start off trying to find some on my own, but this will certainly be useful afterwards.

 

maybe give us a small review of the book?

 

Really enjoyed this book, I didn't bother rereading any of the previous ones though I likely will before book 5 comes out in '23.

Spoiler

I thought there'd be a longer timeskip after this one but then the last few chapters mean book 5 might wrap this up and then a timeskip? Nah, I think Kaladin will definitely be part of the larger cosmere war though Radiants can't leave the Roshar system. I'll have to start following the other cosmere books more, I can't even remember how Elantris

Spoiler

gods died.

 

I finished this yesterday. It had some slow moments, but overall, I enjoyed it a lot. It was about time Navani got more of a spotlight.

 

I actually didn't like Navani getting

Spoiler

the sibling, I was lowkey rooting for the mute guy to get it

I did love her scholar stuff though.

 

So I'm halfway through RoW, and I'll write a full review when I'm finished but I just need to take a minute to vent.

Adolin and Shallan together is just the worst. I know Sanderson struggles to write romance, but dear God this is getting worse than Vin / Elend.

He robs both characters of their respective personalities (adolin - charming but still a bit of an arrogant douchenozzle, shallan- emotionally broken DID nutcase) when they're together and turns them into bland mouthpieces for spewing puns and 'cute couple' dialogue.

It makes we want to scream.

 

Loved this, gripped me for a good 400 pages and had less slog to get there than in the past. 5/5

 

I thought it lost a bit of its focus during the last couple of hundred words, but it was a really good read.

Spoiler

Kelsier leading the ghostbloods was a bit of a shock though, even if I had to have it pointed out to me after I'd finished reading

.

I really like the general direction in which the series is heading, and I can't wait to get some more Odium pov chapters in book 5.

 

Welp, it seems most of you like this book a lot.

Spoiler

I did not like the Navani sub-plot; it was basically tech wank. If it needed to happen, I didn't see why it had to happen to Navani. My perception was that she was playing the role of indy!Harry with financing tech and playing politics. Finding out that she was technically competent just sealed her in that slot. The whole description of the process and the final science chant felt off as well.

Kaladin infecting Sylphrena has made that arc even less enjoyable. Put together with the preface saying Kaladin is a way for the author to highlight dealing with suicidal tendencies, it portends ill for future books. I'd prefer if Kaladin were not a PoV character, maybe someone from his order could serve the same purpose?

Rest of the book was pretty good though.

Speculation here:
Given how mechanistic the essence of shards were shown to be, I wonder if the shards are sentient tools for controlling forces. Hoid hinting at "real" magic in one of the earlier books does seem to point in this direction. I'll be expecting a lot from the next book, given this

Spoiler

and the cliffhanger.

 

So, finished Rhythm of War

Spoiler

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot.

Massive improvement in prose quality, with far FAR less repetition of the Roshar world-building rules than in previous books. This was deeply appreciated, as I really don't need to be told how the specific surges work twelve times per chapter.

Mostly good character arcs all around. Shallan continues to be the most interesting of the lot, which is honestly pretty nice given that her WoK characterization was cringe at best. She's grown a lot and I'm really going to miss Veil in the next book.

Arcs that needed work:

Kaladin: Pretty clear that the whole depression thing didn't come from a place of personal experience for Sanderson. It very much felt like he was just describing what other people told him depression feels like. Basically says as much in the preface. That said, it wound up in a decent place, and is pretty clearly paving the way for Human!Syl, which I think will be interesting.

Adolin: I still don't understand why Sanderson is going all in on Adolin. He is the Garyest Gary Stu to ever Stu, and he still somehow manages to be a constant bore. He doesn't grow. He has no interesting dialogue. He is basically just a mover of plot, there to prop up Shallan, and to a lesser degree, Kaladin. The only place his dramatic arc can really satisfying move to after reviving Maya is as a valiant sacrifice in order to give Shallan and Dalinar the sad feelz. And again, the Shallan/Adolin romance bits are awful cheesy drivel and I hated every minute.

Navani: The scholar stuff was fun to read. Done far better here than it ever was with Shallan and Jasnah. That said, I really really really dislike that she became the Sibling's Bondsmith. She basically bonded the 'spirit of Housewifery.' I get that people were clamoring for Sanderson to give her a role other than 'hot grieving milf that gets Dalinar's peepee hard', but I feel this was a misstep. Now her main bit is to literally run the magical house. Sigh. Mormons gonna Mormon I guess.



I really have no idea where the overall plot is going. Kinda hoping he sets it up so Dalinar loses the challenge early in the next book and things quickly expand into greater cosmere events.

P.S. Not enough Lift.

 

I finally finished this after receiving it for Christmas. Slowness is more a reflection on my poor reading habits than Sanderson. As I did with Oathbringer, in the end I got the audiobook as well and used it in combination with the paper copy. This allows me to do something else at the same time (like go on long walks) which helps me to focus on it, as the internet has ruined me for sitting and focusing on just one thing.

As always with Sanderson, once I got to the ending (where the audiobook said 10 hours to go) I got impatient with the pace of the audiobook, picked up my paper copy, and powered through to the end in a couple of hours.

My primary feeling on finishing the book was a kind of emptiness. It wasn't that I was underwhelmed. I'm still trying to figure out where the feeling came from. Perhaps just from the fact that I had been chipping away at the book for a couple of months and suddenly that habit had come to an end.

Inexplicable feelings aside, I have a kind of dual impression of the book:

Firstly, I liked all the character work. Kaladin and Shallan especially got great resolutions to their long term character arcs. Not final resolutions, but substantial steps forward. Venli, Dalinar, and Jasnah also got good work but weren't really the focus.

Navani obviously had a lot of character work too, but I'm not such a huge fan of her chapters. I think that is largely a product of the fact that her chapters are largely a vehicle for "fabrial science" worldbuilding and I just don't like the worldbuilding that is being delivered through her.

Indeed, I actually think this is the prime example of why I dislike the Sanderson "all the mechanics of the system must be understood by the reader" approach to magic worldbuilding. The end result is that the workings of the world feel far too simple, like a toy version of the real world with all the complexity and difficulty removed. The resulting impression, in terms of Navani's character, is that the worldbuilding undermines her character arc, because the stuff she's discovering seems so simple that we don't get the impression that she's this genius that we're supposed to think she is.

In the real world, something like General Relativity needs like a decade of training just to begin to get your head around it, and even then when GR was first published, it was a common statement among scientists that only 2 people in the world properly understood it. Navani's discoveries, on the other hand, feel like anyone with basic reading ability can understand it (which is necessary for it to be explained as part of a fictional narrative) and the result is that her discoveries - and the world itself - feel shallow.

Raboniel was great though, as was Leshwi. I hate apocalyptic stories because of the way they reduce interesting, complex societies into something much more two dimensional. But Sanderson is really bucking that trope with making the Singer society genuinely complex, factional, and interesting, and Raboniel was a big part of that this entry.

Fuck Moash though. Not because I hate him for doing bad things. But because he's basically a Gary Stu, constantly achieving things that he can only achieve through extreme luck, coincidence, and people holding the idiot ball. If he was the protagonist people would be saying that the story was completely unrealistic. At least our heroes have training and special abilities to achieve their goals. Moash just strolls around and repeatedly stumbles into success.

Anyway...

Secondly, I felt like the character work didn't tie into the plot as well in ROW as it had in Way of Kings or Words of Radiance. In particular, Kalatin and Shallan's big character moments didn't really have anything to do with the resolution of the central conflict of the story. So I think that creates a bit of an emotional dissociation, where the plot climax and the character climax does not coincide, so you end up with a kind of double hump of a climax rather than a single emotional peak. Similarly, Dalinar's "climax" with the Herald felt somewhat dissociated from other goings on.

Probably the best "punch the air" moment of the book was Maya speaking at the trial. However, that plotline also kinda failed to feed into the book's climax. I kept waiting for a load of honourspren to show up in the storm at the end, bonding a new Windrunners in the midst of the rebellion. Oh well.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot more than Oathbringer but it's still well short of the brilliance that was WOK and WOR. For me:

WoK: 10/10
WOR: 9/10
O: 7/10
RoW: 8/10

Also, lol at ScottPress' prediction for the book being basically entirely wrong on every level. But not a huge surprise when he skips like 75% of the material. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're predictions aren't going to be great when you're working off an incomplete picture.

 

SO

What do we reckon are the chances of book 5 ending with the humans being totally defeated, then we have a substantial time skip to the second series set in a Roshar ruled by Odium, somewhat like how The Final Empire was set in a world where the "Dark Lord" had won? Completely different set of characters except for maybe a couple of people from books 1-5 who achieved some semblance of immortality.