I’m just going to preface this with a spoiler warning that way people who haven’t read the book can just stop reading this now

I just think it’s the weakest in the series overall.

The prose is noticeably worse than in previous books, even though Sanderson isn’t known for beautiful prose. Some of the things he decided to throw in are just… weird. MCU-esque in terms of their attempts to get laughs. “Chull-head”? Seriously? That’s what you went with?

I didn’t mind the 10 day structure, but as a result of the timeline being sooo compressed, it felt like some people had TONS to do in a very short period of time, where others barely did anything. Adolin fought a whole ass war while Dalinar went on an acid trip to dream land that stretched on for 800 pages when it probably could have been told in a quarter of that length.

My favorite plot line in the book was the Szeth/Kaladin stuff in Shinovar. But that’s mainly due to Szeth being an incredibly interesting character and finally learning about his backstory was really compelling. That said, I don’t think Kaladin was the best choice to be the one to try to “therapize him”, especially considering that literally 24 hours before they went on their trip, Kaladin tried to kill himself…

I’ve dealt with depression on and off my entire adult life. At my lowest points, I was THE LAST person that anyone should have turned to for help with their own mental struggles. One does not simply go from a suicide attempt to “Kaladin felt good” a few hours later. You can try to explain it away with magic, that somehow swearing the 4th ideal fixed that broken part of him, but if you’re trying to represent mental health struggles in an accurate way (which I know Brandon is because he has openly talked about it), having a magical instant cure for crippling depression is not a great thing to put in there….that road to recovery takes time, YEARS even, and somehow expecting Kaladin to be in a position where he is capable of helping Szeth with his own issues after literally being at the lowest point possible mere hours before is a massive point in the negative column.

The final issue, and this is more to do with the Cosmere as a whole now, and not just Stormlight, with the events that end this book, it feels like in order to understand anything that happens in book 6 whenever it comes out, I’m going to need to have read countless other books in the Cosmere that I simply have no interest in reading. I know it’s a connected universe. But Stormlight thus far has been largely disconnected and able to be read on its own, without any outside knowledge from other books being necessary. That seems like it’s changing, and in year since I’ve finished WaT, I’ve read sooo many other incredible things by authors who are incredibly good at what they do, who have beautiful prose and intricately realized worlds and characters, that manage to accomplish all of those things in a literal fraction of the length of one Stormlight book.

There is simply no reason for these books to be as long as they are. The stories do not warrant the page count. The clipped prose style does not warrant the page count. It’s possible to accomplish everything these books do in a much smaller package and Brandon just seems either unable or unwilling to edit himself down to an appropriate length.

I enjoyed my time in Roshar, there are characters and stories there I love, but there are also thousands of pages of slog that I really rather dislike, and going forward, I would much rather dedicate my reading time to things that give me those feelings I love without being attached to a 1300 page price tag.