“Wind and Truth” by Brandon Sanderson

Full spoiler review. You've been warned.

This was, frankly, a disappointing slog. It had its moments, but unless I hear that book 6 is a return to the form of books 1 and 2 I doubt I’ll be returning to Roshar. If I had been reading this in print instead of audio - which gave me the ability to listen with half an ear while I did other things - I would not have gotten through this. I’m mostly glad I pushed through, because the ending was quite excellent, but it was hard.

My first problem with this book is that Sanderson needs a good, harsh editor. One of his greatest strengths as an author is his imagination and his attention to detail, but that can very easily distract from the narrative. There was no reason, none at all, that we needed a detailed description of Shinovar measuring spoons. It’s cool that he came up with that, but that sort of thing actively makes the narrative worse. That kind of information should go in an appendix, or even a separate book like Robert Jordan had with The World of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. 

Another thing that better editing would help with: the writing. The writing was constantly breaking my immersion. Part of it was out-of-place modern language: no book where wars are mostly fought with spears should include the phrase “establish air superiority.” Other places were just straight-up bad. Much has been said about the exchange between Kaladin and Ishar at their climactic fight (“What are you? Are you his spren? His god?” “No. I’m his therapist.”). But I think there was a much worse line shortly before that: “It was like all the worst days Kaladin had known, distilled into 200 proof awfulness.” That should never have made it into the final version.

Going deeper into this book, I had problems with the plot and character structure of the whole thing. The trope of “Lawful Stupid” kept popping into my head while I was reading this. I could not take Nale seriously as an antagonist, or the Skybreakers in general. Law is complicated, because the world is complicated. If you have laws you necessarily have lawyers and judges, because applying the law is never easy. Treating “the Law” as something you can use, devoid of context, to guide all your judgments is a mindset that shouldn’t last longer than about kindergarten.

Which leads to my problems with Szeth. This was Szeth’s book (in the same way book 1 was Kaladin’s, book 2 was Shallan’s, etc), and I cannot take his personal journey even a little seriously. He wasn’t fixated on “the Law” the way that Nale was, but he was equally fixated on what was “right.” The notion that there isn’t always a clear right and wrong is another one that should be sorted out in childhood. It’s not something I can respect as a challenging notion for an otherwise intelligent and capable adult.

This treating of the law as something simplistic applied to the plot as well, and in a way that was wholly unnecessary. The contract between Dalinar and Odium saying that their duel will decide the fates of lands based on borders at the time is perfectly fine. Dalinar having made a mistake in not having the borders fixed immediately, leading to ten days of furious fighting, also fine. But the notion of “all that matters is who holds the capital” is where it becomes silly. Life is not a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization, and as I said, law is complicated. I cannot begin to accept that there is Alethi law that spells out that holding a capital makes you the legitimate ruler of a country in a way that cannot be argued. And even if we accept that notion, and that Alethi law applies in Azir for reasons, we also accept that the Azish definition of what it means to “hold a capital” applies? I’m sorry, what? It was nonsense, and unnecessary nonsense. The book could have been structured the same without all that, and it dragged everything down.

The grand debate between Odium and Jasnah drove me up a wall. Jasnah is supposed to be intelligent, but the entire thing felt like a debate between a liberal strawman paid to be there and a Ben Shapiro type OwNinG the LiBs wiTh FacTs and LoGiC Really it was a bunch of ad hominem attacks, and Jasnah’s response would have gotten her laughed out of a high school debate team. This entire sequence nearly made me DNF.

On a more mixed note: I give Sanderson full credit for including both positive LGBTQIA+ representation and positive neurodivergence representation, in the character of Renarin. But I deeply wish he’d had a neurodiverse person go through the Renarin POVs as a sensitivity reader; everything about it felt so … clunky is the best word. Again, full credit for including it, but I do expect better execution from a writer of Brandon’s talent.

Another issue that’s been getting worse the more and more Sanderson writes is the intermixing of the Cosmere. It was fun in the first book or two, going “Oh Wit is Hoid! And that minor character used ‘rusting’ as a curse, that must mean they’re from Scadrial!” They felt like little Easter eggs for those of us who had read other Cosmere books. But by this point it’s not fun anymore. It’s exhausting, discouraging, and intimidating. I don’t want to put down a book I was reading for pleasure and feel like I didn’t do my homework. Writing an interconnected universe is fine, and readers needing to read all the bits and pieces to follow is fine. The Stormlight Archives didn’t seem to start out that way, but it does seem to have moved that way. And that feels like a rug pull.

And I think it’s hard to argue that the entire thing was far, far too long. I don’t really feel the need to elaborate on this. 

On a positive note, I thought the end was great. The character arcs of Dalinar, Kaladin, and Shallan (it’s supposed to be obvious that she’s pregnant, right?) all ended exactly where they should have in my opinion. I particularly appreciated the climax addressing something that has been bothering me about the books for a while: holding to an oath is not necessarily a good thing. The Shard of Honor isn’t “good” and continually seeing it that way was a mistake (one Brandon clearly wanted us to make, so good on him).

It’s ironic that in the end of the first sequence of the Journey Before Destination books the destination was worth so much more than the journey. I wish others joy in books 6-10, but for my part I’m done.