Wind and Truth: Book Five of the Stormlight Archive

My gut reaction rating would have been a zero. But that would have been unfair. The ending did have some payoff. I feel like the characters I grew to love in the first two books no longer exist. I have loved stormlight and have been a proponent of it since I first started reading it. Until this book it was steadily downhill, which was tolerable considering the heights we started out with in The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. Unfortunately upon reaching what should have been the climax we fell off a cliff of bad self-help advice and morale posturing told in much too pedestrian and anachronistic prose.(Much more so than his past work) Sanderson can absolutely do better. In this book we glimpse the genius outline that he undoubtedly had in place when he wrote the masterpieces of Wok and WoR, unfortunately it's only just a glimpse, the full view that we all anticipated was in store has been shrouded by Sanderson trying to play morale catch-up and being much too heavy-handed in his view of mental health. I hope that he hires a new editor, and learns to return to the more balanced thought-provoking style of storytelling found in previous cosmere works.

I had some trouble getting through this book. There were many times when the writing broke the illusion of this novel and left a bad taste in my mouth. At times, it felt like Sanderson was forcing his characters to a specific outcome he wanted for them, instead of letting the characters find it their own way. Also I wonder if Sanderson was betraying his craft to appeal to modern day talking points. I know of his desire to bring his stories to the big screen so I'd argue that some things that were included in this story felt motivated toward that end. Having loved Kaladin previously, I really didn't enjoy his arc in this story. He also seemed to backtrack on all his beliefs at the end given who he has become and what he must do. I liked the stories for most characters, but Jasnah's debate with Odium just felt stupid... I know Sanderson is capable of better writing but here again was another example of characters being forced to act a certain way to reach his desired outcome. 3.5/5

I really really wanted to love this book. I've enjoyed Brandon's work through the Mistborn series, into Robert Jordan's bloated fictional work, and beyond... But this... this is just... It's just a shade too far on the indulgent scale. Too long to reach the conclusion, too much background exposition balance against the characters, and ultimately too much of a loss in term of the key cast. I want to believe he can land this, but I'm sorry, I just don't. He wanted the ability to say after the ending, stay with me for another five books and I'll get you there, but we all know what he can do with a traditional trilogy. There's just NO NEED for this kind of bloat. I'm not going to say it's a bad book. It's got great characters doing amazing things (IF YOU STARTED WITH THE BEGINNGING OF THE SERIES, & NOT OTHERWISE), but at this point the feeling I have is that he's just milking the series. It speaks of shades of Jordan with Nynaeve, Egwene, and Elayne walking around sniffing and dragging out the book not talking to each other. Sorry, just cannot recommend this one...