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Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.
It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars are fought for them, and won by them.
One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.
Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by overpowering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.
Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under the eminent scholar and notorious heretic Jasnah Kholin, Dalinar's niece. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan's motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war.
The result of more than ten years of planning, writing, and worldbuilding, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making.
Speak again the ancient oaths,
Life before death.
Strength before weakness.
Journey before destination.
and return to men the Shards they once bore.
The Knights Radiant must stand again.
Recently re-read the Way of Kings and decided to talk about it. First off, it's done by Brandon Sanderson, who wrote the Mistborn trilogy, Elantris, and Warbreaker, all great novels. He's also the one who was pegged to finish the Wheel of Time series when he had one novel to his name. Gives some kind of indication to his talent.
Anyway, Way of Kings was an incredible book. Sanderson has a gift for making every major character come to life no matter what they're doing. They become real and vivid when they appear, each having their own goals and motives, where the conflict that makes everything interesting is inevitable. He explores the minds of the four who tell the story, revealing their backgrounds, their feelings, and their determinations. Each comes from a different walk of life in the culture of Roshar and all of them are as interesting as the next. Each of them has an individual plot in the book, and at first seem uninvolved with each other. But as the book goes on, you begin to notice the four plotlines are getting closer and closer, until by the very end they have all joined together as one cohesive thread.
Another thing I love about Sanderson is he creates such interesting cultures. In Way of Kings the nobles are those with light colored eyes, and the lower class are dark colored eyes. But dark doesn't automatically mean slave, and they can ascend to higher positions through work that are then passed to their descendants. Everything done in the primary culture involves the powerful storms that constantly assault the world. The currency are small glass spheres with various gemstone chips inside them that shine when they are imbued with Stormlight after being left out in a storm. The bigger the chip, the more valuable the sphere. The Infinity +1 Swords/Armors are all imbued with Stormlight. Every living thing has evolved to survive the storms, from plants that withdraw underground at a touch to giant shelled creatures used for work animals. Even the landscapes reflect the storms, bare and open as far as the eye can see.
And thirdly, the magic systems in his work. Mistborn had Allomancy, where swallowing bits of metal allowed magical powers. Warbreaker had Breath and color, that allowed you to command unliving objects. And the Stormlight Archives are no different. Stormlight is a mystical power, first wielded by the assassin in the first chapter. He uses it to create Surgebindings, which I can best describe as altering gravity and where it's pulling. By placing a Surgebinding on a rock it can fly to the opposite wall, putting it on oneself allows for feats of acrobatics beyond mortal men, and using it on structures can bring the whole thing crashing down.
The book is the first of many in the Stormlight Archive, and is Brandon Sanderson's most powerful work to date. I don't know how many in the series are planned, but I do know I'll read every single one. It's just impossible for Sanderson to write something that is not completely engaging.
For anyone who wants to give Way of Kings a shot, he has the first six chapters on his site available for reading here, including the prelude and prologue.
http://www.brandonsanderson.com/library ... -Chapters/
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, World War Z is just da
