Chris

3.5 stars

This is a good start to the series with less momentum in the story than I was hoping for. Despite all of the things that happened along the way, i felt like the really meaningful actions only happened near the end. This was just when I really wanted the story to kick off in a different book.

However, the concept of the magic in this world and the blending of cultures that make up the main setting are fantastic and inventive. I am looking forward to seeing the next step in the series.

This entey was stronger than book 1 and was much more consistent with the pacing. that said, this book is battle heavy and I was ready for the book to end early.

I still find myself less enthusiastic about these books as the original powder mage trilogy, but there are some high spots. Michel and Ben are great characters and I am hoping for a much more revealing book 3 as to the nature of Ka Poel and how she fits into the overarching story.

3.5 stars. This was a strange finale. The build up for both this book on its own, but also for this book as the conclusion to this series and the end of powder mage as a whole was very slow.

if you were hoping to understand more about the nature of the world and the magic, cosmic stakes, etc, this is not going to be satisfying. This story remains locally focused, which is consistent.

I ended up liking the characters more than when I started the series, and this ended more or less the way I thought it would. Perhaps it was little too clean, but I liked the wrap up to the various threads.

3.5

I liked it, but this one was lots of setup. I don't find it as compelling a story as the first Powder Mage series - a lot of the novelty of the worldbuilding and the setting in that original trilogy is worn off here. There's also just not enough of the magic, which is the most interesting aspect of the series. I am curious to see where the new faction plot goes, though.

This is a very tough 2.5 in that I'm not sure if I am grading on a curve or not. This book has some interesting reveals about the nature of stormlight and the greater cosmere that I've been looking forward to for years across multiple series (31 books now apparently) and hints of details. But, because of that, I think I was a little too invested in knowing, so the reveals had more weight from pure anticipation than they were worth. What was given up ultimately was far more valuable - mystery and wonder.

This book is difficult for two reasons: the Cosmere is now the main character of the Stormlight Archive and the driving thrusts of the book are heavy handed - where once Sanderson left the reader to wonder and theorize, he now makes points explicit, secrets optional and connections direct.

This book plays out over the course of ten very long days, which is ironic because the page count is far too long to cover far too short a period in the story. As a result, each character in an arc needs to have a radical A to B transformation. 10,000 years of the history of the universe - subtle - can be covered in a couple hundred pages. Journeys that would otherwise take months or years happen in an afternoon. I suspect this problem is a consequence of Sanderson deliberately breaking the series into two 5 book arcs, and this is the last book in the first set. Spending so much time covering Raboniel and Navani in Rhythm of War instead of gradually building many character arcs forced the hand of this book to condense and info dump. It feels very convenient now that almost everyone knows about investiture, connection, shards, etc. from page 1.

Regardless of how you feel about more simple prose and very new, modern language for the series or the main characters all going through intense psychological transformation, the destination is ultimately more important than the journey for Wind and Truth.