The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson's 1,001 page wristbreaker of a tome, The Way of Kings, is the ambitious start of The Stormlight Archive, which promises to be one of longest, and one of the strongest, contribution to the epic fantasy tradition.

More than a decade in the making, this novel represents the best writing I've seen so far from Sanderson, who has already brought us some excellent work.  The Mistborn Trilogy was particularly compelling, and he's done a fantastic job so far co-authoring the final installments of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time saga.  --Towers of Midnight, the penultimate volume, will be released on November 2nd.

The Backdrop
Sanderson is widely known as a master world-builder.  He has a genius for creating rules of magic that no one has ever thought of and embedding them in societies that genuinely take into account the effects such magic would have on society (particularly if it were a scarce commodity).  In The Way of Kings, he lives up to that reputation with a well-developed system of magic, and exceeds it, adding to his world-building a harsh environment with terrible scouring storms and an ecosystem well-adapted to these climatic extremes: humans seem to be the only animals without shells; grasses and trees pull in their foliage in response to vibrations from wind or touch; the one known land with a more gentle climate has a culture almost totally foreign to the rest of the world as a result.  Roshar is an old world, but much of its history has been lost.  A time of change is coming, a change that has come before: Can humankind piece together the clues it needs to save itself from disaster?  And, in a fallen world, who will rise up to defend the helpless against what is to come? 

The Characters
For all Sanderson's hard work on world-building, what really makes this novel come alive is its characters.  Some of the best people in this story do terrible things, some of the worst people really do have good intentions by their lights, and no one is two-dimensional, not even some of the fairly minor characters.  This first novel tells the converging stories of a whole cast of characters, and one of the joys of reading the book is watching these seemingly separate stories weave together: An assassin, bound by honor and shame; A warrior-prince, bound to very different goals by the same forces; The mother of a king, pragmatic and intelligent, but restricted by her role; A soldier, a natural leader shattered by failure, but driven by compassion to protect those who cannot protect themselves; A student who is not what she seems, and her teacher, a scholar whose work might save them all --or might be too little, too late.


The Stormlight Archive is off to a roaring start, and I'll be waiting eagerly for the next installment.