© James Pyles

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A few months back, my teenage grandson loaned me his copy of Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings (2010). My grandson is a huge fan and wanted to share his enjoyment with me. I really like that.

The first thing I noticed is the book is long, really long. I tend to read novels in the 300-500 page range (or so), but Sanderson’s tome weighs in at 1252 pages. Yikes!

I didn’t read any of the reviews or summaries so I could come at it fresh.

It’s a hard book to get into. For the first several hundred pages, the action switches between a number of players who seemingly have nothing to do with each other beyond living in the same universe. What the heck?

I mean after the mysterious prologue, we see the assassin Szeth-son-of-Vallano executing a king and then he disappears until somewhere in the middle of the book (he does play a pivotal role in the climax).

At one point, Kaladin is a soldier, but when next we see him, he’s a slave.

Sallian is a young woman who is interesting and quirky, but her seemingly hopeless mission bears unexpected fruit…eventually.

Dalinar drove me nuts with his visions and his honor and his obsession to unite the fractured highprinces.

It took a long while to understand how magic worked, the various political and religious systems, and who the heck were the Parshendi?

The good part is that eventually just about everything comes together except for the characters in the “interludes” (they don’t seem connected to anything at all). It takes a long, long time, but the threads begin to weave.

Another good part is when Sanderson decides to surprise you, you never see it coming. I didn’t know anyone was trying to kill Jasnah and if I did, I wouldn’t have suspected the actual assassin. King Elhokar seems terrified of an assassination, especially since his father was killed early in the book, but is someone really after him or is he just paranoid…or both?

I had to take breaks from the book and read shorter novels just for the diversion. I normally read only one book at a time, but the size of Sanderson’s novel made that impossible.

Yes, I admit it. My biggest complaint is that the book is too damn long. My next complaint is that there were large sections that weren’t particularly interesting. It’s not like they weren’t necessary exactly, but the details, while interesting, just weren’t needed.

I did a virtual “happy dance” when I finally passed the halfway point and then as I continued to whittle down the last half, then quarter, then more of the book.

Many mysteries were answered and some were not. Although Kaladin’s powers were more or less explained, I found them to be rather convenient, especially in rescuing the betrayed Dalinar and what was left of his troops.

I really learned to hate Sadas by the end of the novel and was hoping for a bloody, painful death rather than him weaseling out of his misdeeds.

The worst part was that everything ended as a cliffhanger, awaiting the second novel. I did find myself briefly wondering what happened next, but I’m not willing to face a 1,300 plus page book to discover the answers.

Sanderson has won just about every writing award there is and this book has an outrageous number of four and five star ratings on Amazon. That said, it was an exhausting read. Yes, I do want to find out what happens next so will probably (eventually) read the sequel, but not before I consume a lot of shorter and more digestible works first.

Tonight, I’ll return the paperback to my grandson. If he asks me to borrow the sequel, I may just hold onto it for some months before tackling it.

Oh, one more thing. I also review books relative to their inclusion of social justice themes, and as far as I could tell, this novel didn’t have any, or at least nothing that slapped me in the face. That’s one thing I really liked. I didn’t have to slog through someone’s 21st century values system; a thinly veiled agenda presented by an all but talentless activist who wrote a book (and which was only published because) just to lecture we poor, mere mortals in what we should think, feel, and do. Kudos to Sanderson for that.