Book Review – Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

I first read a Brandon Sanderson novel in twelfth grade, cruising through Elantris in English class while I was supposed to be reading something else, and I enjoyed it enough that I sought out more. I thoroughly enjoyed the Mistborn trilogy, and was impressed with how well he managed to bring the Wheel of Time to a close. The Stormlight Archive seemed to be more of the same. I thoroughly enjoyed Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, and Oathbringer was one of my favorite books of 2017. When Rhythm of War came out in 2020 I was stoked, only for the novel to absolutely fall flat for me. Reading it felt like more of a chore than anything else, and I finished it quite a bit less positive about the series than I had been . Since then I haven’t read as much from Brandon Sanderson, trying and failing to get into the later Wax and Wayne books or any of the “secret projects”. So I went into Wind and Truth with some trepidation. To me it seemed like a final chance to find what I had once enjoyed about Sanderson’s writing and found compelling about this series in particular. My results were mixed.

Wind and Truth brings things a bit closer to baseline, but the juice is only just worth the squeeze. It has what you’d expect if you’ve been reading the series, or anything else by Brandon Sanderson. The worldbuilding is deep, the magic system complex, and the action is strong. It’s enjoyable enough. It’s also bloated, stuffed with ancillary Cosmere clutter that adds nothing substantive, and a meandering plot that leaves the majority of its cast spinning their wheels for extended periods of time, all written at a tenth grade reading level. This certainly reminded me of why I liked this series and why Sanderson has been so staggeringly successful, but it also didn’t reignite any of my love for his work. I don’t feel like I wasted my time with it, but I don’t think I’ll be seeking out any more from this series or from Sanderson. That might change; a lot of what I read regularly is worse than this.

Read on if you’re interested in more detailed thoughts on Wind and Truth, but be aware, while I’ve avoided major spoilers, it’s not exactly spoiler free, especially if you haven’t read previous installments of the series.

What Worked

Worldbuilding is of course a strength of Sanderson’s and that’s certainly on display here. Wind and Truth gives us two things only really hinted at in early entries in this series, a deep dive into Shinovar, and a view at the earliest history of Roshar, as well as a glimpse of Ashyn, the original home of humans. This deep history is interesting, but I liked the Shinavar sections much more. I got so invested in the flashbacks into Szeth’s early life that I found myself wishing that those sections had been expanded. Also standard for Sanderson is great action, and Wind and Truth is very in line with the rest of the Stormlight books in that regard. I was also pleased to see this book expand on the diversity of the previous books. The Stormlight Archive has always been fairly diverse in terms of race and gender, but in Wind and Truth Sanderson has made an effort to draw attention to diverse sexual and gender identities as well.

Adolin’s storyline was a standout for me, and his efforts to befriend and help the spren of his shardblade are both interesting and pay off really nicely. In a series that is in many ways defined by the abilities of the Radiants, one of my favorite things over the last two books is someone without those powers finding where he fits. It probably also helps that of the viewpoint characters we get Adolin is probably the most involved with the on the ground events of the plot. While I’m not a huge fan of the Ghostblood subplot in this series, I quite like Shallan as a character, and I like cloak and dagger stuff enough that I enjoyed her sections of the story even if they ultimately don’t add much to the story. Renarin and Rlain tag along with Shalan and I ended up enjoying their story a lot as well. While I mostly like it, I found Szeth and Kaladin’s storyline more mixed. Kaladin’s efforts to understand and befriend Szeth are compelling, as are Szeth’s questioning of his path as a Skybreaker, but their story remains disconnected from the main plot until the very end of the novel, which is frustrating.

What Didn’t

This was a book in desperate need of further edits. Wind and Truth is a big book, coming in at 1344 pages in hardcover, and at least three hundred of those could be cut without really impacting the plot. I understand that this series is playing in the epic fantasy sandbox, but epic fantasy can be achieved without bloated page counts. I don’t mind an author taking their time to tell a story, but in the end I don’t think all of that space was used efficiently, and given where things end it feels more like wheel spinning than anything else. One thing that helps mitigate that length, but negatively impacts my enjoyment, is just how basic the prose is here. I know not to expect complex writing from a Sanderson novel, and being frustrated at that lack is very much a me problem, but it really did bring things down a notch for me. Sanderson has said that he purposefully writes in a more basic style because it gives him a wider readership, and that that’s certainly worked out for him commercially! But as I get older I find that I value writing that asks more of me, that asks me to think and engage with it far more than writing that does not, especially if I’m reading something as long as this was.

The length of the novel is again not helped by the fact that so many character’s storylines feel like they aren’t actually engaged with the main action of the plot. Of the three main characters of the series (Kaladin, Shalan, and Gavinar) none are directly involved with the major events of the plot until the climax of the novel. We get a viewpoint of these events from other characters, mainly Adolin, Jasnah and Sigzil, but it’s frustrating to not have the characters we have spent the most time with involved with climatic events.  Dalinar’s storyline suffers the most from this and absolutely fell flat for me because of that. It’s in many ways a repeat of the visions he had earlier in the series, albeit in a situation where he has more control, and with Navani and their grandson/nephew Gavinor accompanying him. While the visions give us some more insight into the early days of Roshar, and the evolution of the conflict between Humans and Singers, Honor and Odium, these visions drag, doing little more than adding to the page count. Shalan suffers by extension as she follows Gavinar for much of the book prtotecting him from a Ghostblood plot, a plot which ultimately doesn’t have much bearing on the overall story The Ghostbloods are the center of the absurd Cosmere bloat this series has gone through. Having Hoid/Wit as a major character rather than simply making cameos was fun at first, but as this series has gone on it has become more and more choked with additional Cosmere stuff that adds little or nothing. I’m sure it’s fun for superfans who have read everything Sanderson puts out, but if you haven’t it’s just filler, and potentially frustrating. Several times while reading I was presented with a character I was sure I was supposed to recognize, checked the Coppermind wiki and discovered they were from a novel or short story I had never read. 

The Ending

I’ll try to keep this as spoiler free as I can, but I have to at least touch on how things end. Wind and Truth is both the midpoint of the Stormlight Archive and the conclusion of its first narrative arc. As the midpoint of a story I think this ends in a good place, setting up future installments and dramatically shaking up the status quo. I’m less impressed with how it wraps up this arc. The ending here is decidedly bittersweet, and I’m not entirely happy with how a number of characters and plotlines end up. There’s enough positivity in the ending that I wouldn’t call it bad, but I feel it definitely could have been stronger, especially since there will likely be a significant time jump in book six.