Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson Book Review

There is much to be said for the dusty backyard bookstores that popped up from 1998 to 2005 or so. They didn't serve coffee and the workers were mostly cold spinsters, but they did have their own cloistered ambiance. It was much like picking through an abandoned house, books and papers stacked randomly, with a thin, and sometimes think, veneer of dust covering every inch of the untouched shelves. You got the sense that the spinsters didn't you want you there. That reading was the hobby that they thought might be fun to turn into a job. Lo and behold, it was work.

The BBC series Black Books picked up on that spirit of those places, but like the movement itself, it was short-lived. Most BBC series seem to serve their purpose in a few short series or two and then kindly move on. The actors move on to different projects and the series is remembered fondly for not overstaying it's welcome.

It was at one of those bookshops that I found George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. It was very random. I was in a hurry and just grabbed what I could and left. And yes, I started the second book first and it was so good I went back and read the first one.

It's almost better to know that a series is well on it's way and that there is no wait for the second or third book because after reading The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, I'm ready to continue the story.



Like Martin's Thrones, it's sprawling in scope, and it does become difficult to parse through all the different religions and locations, but it isn't drudgery. The drag really comes as he's introducing the magic system. I guess that's a thing now. There's a whole section of books devoted to "magic systems". It feels a little forced in the way it's introduced, but once he gets it out of the way, it's smooth sailing. (I tend to prefer John C. Wright's Golden Age series, in that it's drops you like a meteor hurtling down from space into a strange new world.)

Something could be said regarding the odd plant and animal life that make up the world, but the rest of the story is too close to reality to really be anything more than a passing glance. I never got the sense of weirdness that I felt in the Mistborn series.

Unfortunately, it feels a little thin on history. Given that it starts 4500 years before the present, those years don't feel very full. Perhaps that is closer to reality, but in the book it feels like the reader is missing the history that might make the characters whole.

But for all the things that felt wrong, maybe I'm just complaining that there are "too many notes." It's ambitious and is supposed to be part of a 10 book series. The first one feels like several already. All I can hope is that he is able to avoid the trappings that G.R.R. Martin could not escape when he got to books four and five of Thrones. Godspeed, Brandon Stormblessed.