Reviews

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

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mpruett's review against another edition

4.0

Summary: An engaging, well written, very long (too long at several points) story about a fantasy world and the heroes in it.

Review: So I always have a hard time reviewing works of fiction because you can’t talk about anything into much detail or you’ll spoil the plot twists. And honestly plot twists are the best part of fiction. So with that in mind I’ll just talk a little bit about the book generally I guess.

First off it’s really freaking long. Like really really long are, and while that isn’t a bad thing on its own you can tell that Brandon is trying to do a lot of world building so you spend time reading about places and things that honestly don’t impact this book and I’m not sure yet if they impact the series. While it helps make the setting authentic I don’t really know if it’s needed and there’s a lot of it. On more than a few occasions I started speed reading because I just wanted to get to the next important thing.

It’s also very much written as the first part in a series. You sort of can’t really read this book on its own or the ending will just leave you wondering what happens next. If you can’t, or don’t want to, invest the time it’s gonna take to read four, 1000+ page books this probably isn’t the series for you. It took me almost 3 months of on and off reading to finish this book so it’s gonna take me like a year to read this series.

I do really like the overall plot, I like most of the characters, and I really like the story style where each chapter jumps between different characters. But even here I feel like he spends a lot of time building background and lore around the characters. While it’s not a bad thing at all it’s definitely a long reading experience.

All that being said I really liked the book. I do think there’s so much included that he should have cut things out and it would’ve made it a better book but I’m glad I read it and I am looking forward to the next books. If you’re into fantastical world building, swords and magic stuff you’ll probably really like this series and it’s much better than most of the ones I’ve read. I’m pretty sure putting it up there with Lord of the Rings is sacrilege but I’ll just say they’re both very good series.

Time to Read: 18 hours