Review of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

A decade+ ago I was trying to catch up on everything that had been happening in speculative fiction. After years and years away, I consumed just about everything I could get my hands on. From popular books to forgotten books, well known authors to niche, I was open to anything. The internets had a lot of positive things to say about Brandon Sanderson, so I jumped into the Mistborn trilogy. I climbed out, dismayed. Colorful, engaging ideas but poor, unedited technique. Style, syntax, and execution are important. I was put off. A believer in second chances, however, I recently picked up another popular Sanderson offering to see if a few years could improve technique—to convert those nice visuals into well written story. Let's look at The Way of Kings (2016).

Putting both feet onto the road paved by George R.R. Martin in A Game of Thrones, The Way of Kings is a multi-viewpoint, multi-faction, first entry in a lengthy epic fantasy series. Set in a generic, medieval secondary world called Roshar, it tells the stories of a handful of people who call the land home. One is a female scholar with a secret mission to steal an arcane object from a renowned magician. Another is an assassin wielding magical weapons on the run but trying to find direction in life. And still another is the son of a surgeon. Now a slave, he fights oppression from the bottom up. These characters have lives separate from one another, but binding them together is a lore featuring shardblades—magical swords that cut through anything (lightsabers?), thus granting the bearer supreme status. Everybody wants one...

If you didn't catch that, The Way of Kings is not as original as the Mistborn series. There is nothing as novel as ingesting metals to gain special powers. The world, the magic, the character arcs—there is little that doesn't have an analog elsewhere in fantasy fiction. In fact, the only things that set the story apart are the spren (little spirit fairies that add nice visual and emotional flavor to scenes) and the popularity of Sanderson's name on the cover. The one thing The Way of Kings has over Mistborn is improved technique. This improvement, however, is relative.

If you gave The Way of Kings to a high school English teacher, it would come away awash in red. Bad similes would be highlighted:

“Patchy, like the coat of a sickly horse.”

And:

“The Stormlight raged inside of him, and the hallway suddenly grew darker, falling into shade like a hilltop cut off from the sun by a transient cloud.”

Spurious exposition would be crossed out.

Kaladin slid on his sandals—the same ones he’d taken from the leathery-faced man on that first day—and stood up. He walked through the crowded barrack.”

And another example, this time an action scene disrupted:

“Szeth leaped backward as the Shardbearer swung upward with his Blade, slicing into the ceiling. Szeth didn’t own a set of Plate himself, and didn’t care to. His Lashings interfered with the gemstones that powered Shardplate, and he had to choose one or the other.”)

And question marks would be located near the numerous, unearned emotions.

“Then don’t go,” he said, growing terrified.

“I have to,” she said, cringing. “I can’t watch this anymore. I’ll try to return.” She looked sorrowful.

And the teacher would likewise have questions, questions about why so much content treats its (supposedly adult) readers like morons. What is the necessity of the following underlined passage (my underlline) when meaning is uber clear from the preceding lines?

“He started pulling again. Bridgemen who were laggard in work were whipped, and bridgemen who were laggard on runs were executed. The army was very serious about that. Refuse to charge the Parshendi, try to lag behind the other bridges, and you’d be beheaded. They reserved that fate for that specific crime, in fact.”

Also, why do we need “specific”? Why do we need “in fact”? (Answer: we don't need them...)

The high school English teacher would likewise draw attention to the consistently inconsistent characterization. For example, the scene wherein Shallan goes to a bookstore. At first she is the saucy, competent Southern gal who uses wordplay to cut a zealous bookseller down to size. But when he states a price five times the going rate, she becomes docile, consigning herself to buying fewer books instead of bargaining. The fire of her words just a couple paragraphs earlier is suddenly quenched. In her place we get a weak woman willing to accept any price offered. I don't care if Shallan is a strong or weak woman, just be consistent in her presentation.

Whole sections of The Ways of Kings would be circled in red, with the word “Necessary?!?!?” written beside them. For some reason, Sanderson feels compelled to describe transitory details. I lost track of how many pages cover the following scenario: Character A moves from Place X to Place Y. Rather than just entering a paragraph break at the end of Place X with the relevant verbiage to indicate a transition, Sanderson instead takes the character through many meaningless steps from X to Y. Stopping to smell the flowers is all fine and good when it serves theme. But when it's just spurious rambling, it's not. Necessary?!?!

Aspiring writers pay attention. Two more points.

Our English teacher would write encouragement, as well. She would circle the following words and ask: Is it possible to make the meaning of these words implicit through more sophisticated means than blunt combination: stormlight, flamespren, shardblades, lighteyes, voidbringers, stonewalker, stumpweight, rockbuds, glyphwards, stormblessed, logicmasters, soulcaster, shalebark, axehound, gemheart, chasmfiend, oathstone, etc., etc. As it stands, any six year old could do the same. Johnny, what do you call a a mix of feline and canine? Catdog!

The last point I'm not sure our English teacher would bother with. But I will: the red flags of cheap fiction. See the following:

He felt grim, tired, and wet. But he wrapped himself in the responsibility he had taken, the responsibility for these men. He held to it like a climber clung to his last handhold as he dangled from a cliff side.
He would find a way to protect them.

There is no other word except “maudlin” to describe such writing. Forget the bad simile. Forget the forced emotion. Forget the italicized word. It's just piss poor opera.

In summary, The Way of Kings feels one step shy of high school storytelling. Sanderson's thesaurus is nowhere to be found. The story appeals to the simplest of emotions. Presentation holds the reader's hand—then holds the other in case the meaning was not explicitly, abundantly, wholly clear. There is an avalanche of doublewords, meaning the reader spends more time searching their growing dictionary of Sanderson's neologisms than imagining the world he is creating—a world he could have created with effective exposition. All in all, the book is an entertaining film that has the misfortune of being slapped, stretched, padded, and coddled onto the page—like Mistborn.