REVIEW: WIND AND TRUTH (THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE #5)

When both the journey and the destination fall flat...

I'd decided I would pick up WIND AND TRUTH on audio as soon as it released. It's devoured all of my audiobook time the last couple of months and now I have finally concluded this overstuffed conclusion to the first half of THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE.

HOW I RATED IT 

3/5 While there plenty of really good moments to be found within this mammoth tome of a book, I ultimately felt that this was not the heart-pounding climax of the series' first arc that I wanted it to be, nor was it the victory lap that the Cosmere deserved or even a book that justified it's own egregious length. 

Please note: While I will aim to avoid any major spoilers for WIND AND TRUTH, I will mention characters, places, and events in ways that could be considered spoilers for previous books in the STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE as well as make vague allusions to THE SUNLIT MAN.

CHARACTERS

Even though Sanderson is known as a master plotter, THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE has always been on the more character-centric side of things, at least in comparison to his other work. The same is true in this latest installment, but sadly I think the character work is quite a mixed bag. The chief problem is that there are just far too many characters in general and an absurd number of them that now serve as main POVs. Sanderson seems to care a great deal about various minor characters and insists upon checking in with them even if they have little to no relevance on the plot. This problem is rather exacerbated by the fact that everyone who's anyone all seem to go their separate ways and never really come back together. This means that the book is steeped in our our main characters having interactions with new or previously very minor characters in a sort of branch-out effect where there is an overwhelming number of character relationships being developed in varying degrees of depth. For what it's worth, I think Adolin and Shallan both had interesting personal journeys and I rather liked their perspective chapters. Kalladin teams up with Szeth and I enjoyed their dynamic as well, largely due to how we get more of Szeth's backstory and the way that he evolves as a character. Kalladin was... okay... I've never been the most massive fan of his and while I can appreciate what Sanderson is trying to do with his character, I just don't think he quite manages to handle the more cerebral aspects of his arc with the subtlety and nuance that he clearly seems to think he's achieving with the meta-conversation he wants to have with readers on mental health. Dalinar's story has lots of twists and turns, but I found his character moments to be annoyingly repetitive. The circular nature of his arc was clearly intentional and had thematic relevance, but the execution of the moment-to-moment for him just did not work well for me. Then there's characters like Venli who barely get anything at all to do. While I think her chapters could have easily been cut with minimal consequence, I was also sad that she did not play a bigger role since it seemed like she would become extremely important after the previous book. I enjoyed following a certain member of Bridge Four, but his chapters largely felt like they were setting up the role he will play in subsequent books as well as to connect the dots between this novel and THE SUNLIT MAN Rather than being something substantial on their own merit. Ultimately, I still enjoyed spending time with the majority of this cast, but the character arcs often felt underwhelming and I wasn't overly thrilled with where any of them ended up by the story's end.    

PLOT/TONE

I would charitably describe the plot of this book as a bloated mess. There are subplots within subplots and each chapter tends to be chopped up such that we head-hop multiple times, sometimes bouncing back and forth between the same POVs and sometimes doing a sort of world tour. What's also strange is that sometimes these different perspectives seem to be in lock step with one another, but then other times it feels as though some characters are operating on a completely different timeline than the others (and no, I'm not talking about the time distortion for the characters in the Spiritual Realm, but rather the sequencing of scenes for characters who are operating within the Physical Realm). A massive portion of the story is dedicated to a couple different parties of characters traversing through visions in the Spiritual Realm. While the bits of lore were really cool and revealed a ton of crucial information about both Roshar's history and the Cosmere overall, it just felt strange to have so many main characters spending the majority of the book in here when there is a world-defining conflict looming mere days ahead of them. Within this part of the story there is also a budding love story that I've seen people get both weirdly angry and oddly excited about given how small a part of the book it is. My cold and callous take on it is that it's just one more subplot on top of all the other micro stories that Sanderson decided to cram in here and it feels out of place in the context of the quest these characters are supposed to be on (plus Sanderson isn't exactly the most adept at handling romance arcs in general, so this one is about as gripping as you might expect). 

As much as I enjoyed learning more about Szeth, I felt like his side of the story was extremely lacking. While it would have made for a fine plot in an Action RPG videogame, going from one temple to another to fight different "boss" characters was not at all satisfying in book form. To finish things off, there's all the connection points to the broader Cosmere that should also be addressed. To be fair, this element was to be fully expected. The series has been trending this way for the last couple of books and it would have been a letdown for the broader Cosmere not to play a big part in the story. That said, this series can no longer be feasibly enjoyed without having read just about everything else Sanderson has written in this universe so far, as there are things that will simply make no sense at all unless you have the proper context. I think this could have worked for me as I enjoyed how all this was handled in both THE LOST METAL and THE SUNLIT MAN, but because the core plot of WIND AND TRUTH is so disjointed, the inclusion of these otherworldly plot points merely added to the confusion and a lot of them never manifest to anything substantial within the scope of this story. What also never manifested for me was any sense of momentum towards the end. I truly could not say when the famous "Sanderlanche" began because the final days of the conflict and even the final chapters of the book rolled along as sluggishly as the rest. When the final moments ended, I simultaneously felt unfulfilled but also did not have any desire to immediately consume more of this series (which is probably good for me since it'll be a while before there's more available). I'd been holding out hope that the last 20-30% of this would absolutely sweep me off my feet like the ending to THE HERO OF AGES did. I understand that this is not the final book in the series, but the marketing of the book and comments made by the author absolutely suggested that this would be a big finale to the first half of the series and that's just not how things played out for me.  

SETTING/WORLD

If there is one aspect where this mother-of-all-novels delivers in a big way, it is probably in the worldbuilding. Anyone who's read this far may have noticed that I neglected to speak to any of the Heralds when I addressed the book's characters. That's partly because I've never been able to connect with any of them as characters and instead have largely viewed them as either plot points or bits of lore that I regard dispassionately. Honestly, I still kind of feel that way even though there are some developments toward the story's end that attempt to humanize them a bit. That said, we finally get to know their story on a much deeper level thanks to the visions seen within the Spiritual Realm and I actually found it to be quite engaging. We get to see the earliest days of humanity first settling on Roshar after the cataclysmic events of their home world. We also get answers to the role that the gods played in it all and how Odium, Honor, and Cultivation all came to form different kinds of relationships with different life forms on the planet. There are even some glimpses into little bits of Hoid/Wit's backstory as the true nature of who and what he is is teased out. The exact timelines for his travels between other worlds (particularly those of a couple of the Secret Projects) remains a bit confusing, but I enjoyed having his background fleshed out a little more since he's been such a pivotal part of Cosmere lore for so long. In the more tangible side of worldbuilding, we get to spend a lot more time in some of the different nations across Roshar. We see them under a time of duress as the Fused try to claim each before the deadline of the conflict between Dalinar and Odium arrives, but there is still time to learn about the culture of each and it was fascinating to see how they responded to the stress of the conflict. We also get a lot more information on the Spren alongside some older forces that live upon Roshar which seem to hint at perhaps some new types of magic or at least powers that exist out in the Cosmere which we may not yet be familiar with. I get that it's entirely possible that not all readers are going to care about the deeper lore of this planet and the universe at large, but I've always felt like this is an area that Sanderson excels in and I was happy to see that it was all on point in this book even if other aspects felt like they were not at the level of quality that we've come to expect. 

AUDIOBOOK

Love them or hate them, the Reading-Kramer duet is back for this fifth book and do a mostly good job of delivering their best performance even if the story they are telling is not the strongest outing for Sanderson. The editing for this must have been a nightmare with all the mid-chapter perspective shifts which often involved both narrators having sections of an individual chapter, so kudos to whomever cobbled it all together into one coherent production. Kramer felt like he really brought his A-game as I don't think he's ever given a stronger showing than this. That said, I noticed more than ever that he will assign the same or very similar voices to different types of characters, though I can certainly empathize that he had his work cut out for him with the cast being as enormous as it is. Reading gave a largely serviceable performance, but there were certain sections of the story where it felt like she was really struggling in a way that was hard to put my finger on. It was almost like maybe her voice was just strained or perhaps she was tired while recording that bit (this seems to happen at random points). In a book this ridiculously long, I think that's perhaps forgivable, especially since I don't know what kind of timeline the pair was under to get this all recorded, but it does make me wonder if they can feasibly continue to be the "voices of The Cosmere" for too much longer. 

Unrelated to their performance, I did also want to mention that the prose itself took a bit of a nosedive. Yes, the plot was a mess that needed far more developmental editing than it got, but the literal writing itself was also in need of some TLC that it didn't seem to get. I've mentioned that some character arcs felt repetitive. That's because the way their scenes are split up tend to rehash things that were just said not that long ago about what a certain character is thinking or feeling. This slows down the action and added to the fluffy feeling of the story itself. While Sanderson has proven that he can write fun action scenes, the fights in this book are an absolute snooze fest because they are all delivered almost like an expositional dump where we very rarely get to feel like we are in the thick of things with a particular character. In a book that is all about the big climactic struggle between two opposing forces, both physical and divine, this is nothing short of tragic. I'm not really sure the narrators could have done anything to salvage the shoddiness of the prose in these cases since I could tell they were doing their best to make everything sound exciting. Unfortunately, the way things were written sucked a lot of the impact out of key moments that should have had me fidgeting on the edge of my seat.  

CONCLUSION

WIND AND TRUTH is certainly not a terrible book. There are some moments that are extremely satisfying in the ways that I've come to expect from this series. With that said, it is also not a great book, nor is it the victory lap that this series deserved as it's finale to the first arc (essentially the mid-series finale). Things do leave off on some interesting notes, but the fact that so much of the plot(s) concludes with so little closure after dragging on for such a long duration ultimately left me feeling like both the journey and the destination were sorely lacking the narrative zest that they needed. At the end of it all, I feel like this is a book that is disappointingly mediocre because it chokes upon it's own scope, feels unfinished in terms of the writing, and fails to justify it's absurd length (in my opinion, if you are going to have a 1000+ page book, then every single scene needs to be absolute fire and gold). I don't think that this is the last Sanderson book I ever read or anything, but I am no longer as infatuated with this series as I once was and probably won't opt to collect the books physically like I was contemplating now that the first arc is complete. The fact that we won't be returning to Roshar for some time is both a tough pill to swallow in terms of how unsatisfying the ending to this was and also a relief in that I think Sanderson would benefit from taking on projects outside of this series and hopefully can come back to it later with a renewed focus to do it the justice that it deserves. 

(+) Some of the character moments were quite special

(+) Szeth serving as the flashback character for this installment was awesome

(+) There is a ton revealed about the lore for both Roshar and the Cosmere overall

(+) I was satisfied with the connections between this series and THE SUNLIT MAN

(+) There were some interesting developments at the end even if the intensity of them was lacking

(-) There are just far too many characters to reasonably care about despite how much Sanderson insists upon trying to make us like them

(-) The plot is a tangled mess of branching narratives that all tell completely separate stories with their own casts of characters

(-) Cosmere connections ended up feeling like noise due to the unfocussed nature of the larger story

(-) The subpar quality of the prose sucked the intensity out of the story's bigger moments as well as most of the action scenes

(-) Things left off in a largely unsatisfying and unresolved way