[Matthew Brown]

I’m very many books into the Stormlight Archive.

I bounced right off the first book on my initial reading attempt, but I found myself with time to kill and gave it another go. Book 1, Volume 1 has five or six first chapters, and you need to steam past all of that to get into the story. Many of those introductions do not entirely pay off in the first volume, but they do all pay off eventually. I’d tell any new writer this was a bad idea, and I’m not sure HRH should have tried it either, but the rest of the collection is worth getting past that.

Each book has a sense of beginning, middle, and end and yet the Stormlight Archive never feels episodic (which can be bad). Each book leaves you wanting to read the next one. The most recent one had a twist that took me entirely by surprise while also feeling entirely uncontrived and recontextualising a lot of what went before. I’ve seen great storytellers stack it completely with easier twists, but Sanderson lands it perfectly. I was left feeling like “holy sh*t, what!?!” after reading a tiny passage of almost throwaway text as casual as “yeah, it rained yesterday.” Somehow that made it even better.

If you enjoy long sagas and slow-burn personal growth with more than enough action and magic in there too, then The Stormlight Archive is for you.

Anyone want to nerd out about the series with me?

[Author]

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