Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

In Oathbringer, the third volume of the New York Times bestselling Stormlight Archive, humanity faces a new Desolation with the return of the Voidbringers, a foe with numbers as great as their thirst for vengeance.

Dalinar Kholin's Alethi armies won a fleeting victory at a terrible cost: The enemy Parshendi summoned the violent Everstorm, which now sweeps the world with destruction, and in its passing awakens the once peaceful and subservient parshmen to the horror of their millennia-long enslavement by humans. While on a desperate flight to warn his family of the threat, Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with the fact that the newly kindled anger of the parshmen may be wholly justified.

Nestled in the mountains high above the storms, in the tower city of Urithiru, Shallan Davar investigates the wonders of the ancient stronghold of the Knights Radiant and unearths dark secrets lurking in its depths. And Dalinar realizes that his holy mission to unite his homeland of Alethkar was too narrow in scope. Unless all the nations of Roshar can put aside Dalinar's blood-soaked past and stand together--and unless Dalinar himself can confront that past--even the restoration of the Knights Radiant will not prevent the end of civilization.

I can't describe how marvelous this book is. I don't think I can do it justice. Just read it, people; that'd be a wise choice.

I really like this series, these characters, and Sanderson's writing, but this one felt especially long to me. There are certain points where everything is happening at a mile a minute and I couldn't put the book down, but other times dragged quite a bit for me.

There are some things that happen, especially in the climax and denouement, that seem very cliche and yet still mostly work with the way that Sanderson is able to build momentum into a frantic blur of scenes. There's a fight near the end that feels like something straight out of a final boss encounter in a video game.

Sanderson has built a great world in this series and tends to dole out interesting new ideas at rapid pace, but it seemed like in the last act so many new ideas came out of seemingly nowhere (though I do admit I may have just flat out missed some foreshadowing) that it lost some of the impact for me as it felt as though literally anything could have happened.

I still enjoyed this book quite a bit and couldn't stop reading for the last quarter of it or so, and I'll eagerly await the next one.

“A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.To love the journey is to accept no such end.”

Yeah, that didn't make me cry, at all!
The character interactions are still the strongest in The Stormlight Archive. Part 5 was glorious with the changing POVs. I have a lot of questions, but the most important one is: How old exactly is Hoid?

Brandon knocks it out of the park. It's easy to rattle off the standard criticisms of his writing - the heavy exposition dumps, the told-not-shown characterisation. But increasingly I find that I just don't care, and can even spin those cons into things that I like. The worldbuilding in Roshar is so intricate and exciting that I crave every dump of exposition; each one gives me more to process and ponder. And while it's easy to dismiss the characters as intrinsically talented and therefore uninteresting, I no longer think that I read fantasy for relatable every-person struggles, nor do I think I should. I want to see that I'm reading characters who are exceptional, almost by necessity (spren bond them, after all), and consider what it means to be that way in the face of unimaginable circumstances.

Nor are Brandon's best features missing from Oathbringer. The pacing is continuous and non-stop, even the interludes leave us craving more. Every chapter is a revelation, or a laugh, or a development, or growth, interweaved to be continuously engrossing. I did, after all, get through the 1200+ pages here in a day or so, and it was not exactly forced. If there was one thing I would nitpick at, it would be the increasing prominence of the cosmere in the book. I worry about how an inexperienced reader, or someone who didn't wait out for the book's release, will receive the continuous interjection of terms like Connection, Investiture, Splintering and others. I think more characters than ever before in Oathbringer are involved in the cosmere, and they play much bigger parts.

I am feeling like I find it harder to give praise than to nitpick these days. Still, read this book. And then again, once you've had a chance to appreciate the careful craft in this beautiful, beautiful volume.