Rhythm of War

This book was looooong. Like, nearly 2 and a half days long. Even longer than Book 3, which I found hard to believe. Don’t get me wrong. I love massive fantasy worlds with spools and spools of world building full of the tiny little details of each character that truly let you get to know them as people and not just protagonists. Sanderson does all of that. He always has and is arguably the best, if not one of the best, at doing so of all the headliner mainstream fantasy authors currently out there. The man is a writing machine, but the fact is that a book this long, no matter how talented the writer, can’t keep a high rate of pacing. There is nothing high octane about this book, with a hell of a lot of filler going on in between the main events, and anyone who has read any of my other reviews knows that I like good pacing in my books. As such, this latest masterpiece of epic fantasy fell a little short for me personally. However, let’s face it, a Sanderson novel falling a little short is likely still going to be of a standard a notch above the rest. The man’s a master of his craft, pure and simple.

So, what to say about specifics. The story was, once you finally traverse your way to the far side, very good. Twists and turns aplenty with all of our favourite characters finding themselves in their own personal struggles, which in of themselves could have been small novels. And all is set against the churning backdrop of the continued war between the Humans and the Singers. We don’t really travel to many new and exotic locations here, with the book primarily being situated around Urithiru, which isn’t such a bad thing. The tower is an incredibly interesting creation that, as the book progresses, we come to see in an entirely different light. We do, however, get a significantly greater glimpse at Shadesmar, both in its physical stance and the dynamics of how the realm of the Spren is run. It truly is an amazing place that Sanderson has created, with its own rules for physics and logic that are a joy to learn. And that’s not to say Roshar has been left wanting in the book either.

Roshar is one of the most complex living breath worlds as I’ve come across in fantasy, and this book only adds buckets and buckets of additional content to bulk out this amazing universe. I’m going to choose one example here. One that truly blew me away. I’m a writer myself, and in my own work I’ve come up with one particular physical effect of my magic system that fits so perfectly that I couldn’t believe it when I thought it up. Something I thought was genuinely clever on a level I didn’t think I was capable of. Then I listened to how Sanderson explains the way flight is achieved in this book, and suddenly I felt like the simplest of bumbling toddlers knocking his toys together and screaming ‘Science!’. In this book, Sanderson has invented an entirely novel method of aerial propulsion. Not just, ‘oh they have magic and it makes them fly’. This is an actual method of flight that, once you consider the physical properties of some of the aspects of the world he has created, would actually work! I’m a scientist in my day job, and hearing him explain how the minute principles of things he has spent multiple books explaining could all be ravelled together to produce a legitimate method of flight… well, I may have had a tiny nerd-gasm. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s a big deal. He’s done the equivalent of inventing an entirely new arm of science in the form of his magic system, in the causes and effects of stormlight and fabrials on the physical world and how those might be fitted together. It just blew me away. It’s the sort of thing that makes you realise why so many people consider Sanderson as the best of our current crop of living fantasy writers.

Now, onto an opinion that many may not only not share but actively oppose. One of the big themes of this book is mental health, with several characters going through some really dark shit. This has been beautifully researched and expertly implemented in a way that truly gives the listener/reader a painfully real glimpse of the struggles that mental illness can cause. That said, I just think there was too much of it in the book. By all means, having some of it in there adds a lot to the book, and had I wanted to listen to a novel about the struggles against the absolutely awful demons that can live within our own psyches, then this couldn’t have been better. But the fact is that I came here for an action-adventure story. Yes, there is definitely ample room for some of the mental health themes in the book. Absolutely. They really add to the characters and their stories. But so much? Constantly? For some people these aspects will be the very best parts of the book, and I completely understand that, but making it one of the main themes of the book and having it come to dominate so much of what happens just wasn’t what I was after in this novel. But that’s just my opinion.

So to round up, this book had a lot of extremely good content. Stuff that was genuinely fantastic, innovative, and captivating. Unfortunately, it all too often became bogged down in the absolute truck-load of exposition, information dumps, and complicated inner workings of the characters every thought. Was it a good book? Yes. Was it Sanderson’s best? Not in my opinion. However, the tantalising titbits that we are slowly accruing about the Cosmere universe as a whole and the giant world-devouring cross-over we are lining up between all of his books alone would be enough to keep me glued to this series, let alone the fact that the story is still amazing. 

As for narration, well, lets face it, it’s Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. These are the go-to king and queen of epic fantasy. I don’t think they are ever going to give anything but a sterling performance, and although they may not be my absolute favourite narrators in all of audiobooks, they’re certainly up there.

Personal Score: 3.75 Star   

Professional Score: 4.0 Star