Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

The second part of the Stormlight Archive.

After a long setup in the first part, the story really starts to move. It is pretty hard (and I believe pretty pointless) to describe the plot in any detail as it took a long time to get there and this book again contains well over a thousand pages. Any plot descriptions easily contained hundreds of words and were just a brief glance at the whole and many plot lines in the book – which mostly meet up by the end of the book.

Anyway, the main characters finally are brought together and start fully realizing their powers. Also, their whole world is apparently facing a turning point. The Voidbringers, the enemy which was thought to be a fairy tale, have come back. But the Knights Radiants who opposed them also returned. And many of the main characters turn out to be Knights.

One of the most interesting characters is Lift, a very young thief who apparently has special powers and starred in one of the “Interludes” story fragments aside from the main parts of the book. The flashback scenes about Shallan were also very good and told where that character really came from. There is a resurrection of a character I was 100% sure wasn’t dead.  And already in the first book, I suspected that there was something more in the “battle thrill” which tended to portray the soldier as just an ordinary battle lust. There were a few hints in that direction in this book also. 

The writing was at the same level as before. The humor was nice, but not too sophisticated. The next book will probably be a bit different; the setting at least will be wildly different.  

1310 pp