It’s been four years since I wrote my review of Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythm of War. In that post, I did a fairly deep dive into the plot, worldbuilding, and character development of the fourth installment of the Stormlight Archive.
Now that series has a fifth entry, Wind and Truth. It came out a few months ago, I read it to kick off 2025, and I’m feeling just sick enough to offer up some thoughts on this particular novel. So let’s go.
Oh, and of course, reviewing the fifth book of a series is obviously going to spoil the first four. It has to be that way. I can’t talk circles around things that have been happening for…what? Almost 15 years now?
The plot
Wind and Truth picks up almost immediately after Rhythm of War left off, and the book is structured around the ending to its immediate predecessor. Dalinar, head of the Knights Radiant and effective leader of the free peoples of Middle—I mean, Roshar, has forced the dark god Odium into an agreement: ten days hence, there will be a clash of champions that will decide the fate of the world.
Thus, the novel is divided into ten parts, one for each day, with some interludes in between. Which is a pretty neat trick, I must admit. In the eighth entry of my Otherworld series, I did something similar, so it’s nice to see a "real" author using the same gimmick. It also helps with the flow, I think. And that’s something needed, because this is a very sprawling book.
Anyway, the plot. The way the deal works is that both sides get to keep the territory they’ve gained at the moment the duel begins. As there’s fighting on more fronts than World War I, that means a mad dash in every direction as armies scramble for territory. Add in the intrigue, politicking, and outright treachery that the bad guys are of course going to use, and it makes for a lot of action.
But that’s not all that’s going on. Kaladin, our hero since the beginning of the series, has been given his own mission. Events in Rhythm of War have left him mentally broken, but in a place where he feels not only that he’s coming out of it, but that he knows how to help other people do the same. In other words, he’s becoming his world’s first therapist. (Wit, a side character who has become much more important as the series has progressed, even states it that way. But I’ll get to that in a moment.)
Kaladin’s quest involves taking Szeth, the first character we ever met back in Way of Kings, to his homeland in the far east. That quickly becomes a major trial straight out of a JRPG, with Szeth needing to free his land from a foul influence one gym leader—er, honor-bearer—at a time. Seriously, it’s very reminiscent of Pokemon or a shounen anime. The Radiant powers only add to the feel.
Meanwhile, the other main characters are playing their parts in the final days of the war. The spren are now no longer simple manifestations of emotions, but important people in and of themselves. And the scope has crept up more than my work, which is a good time to talk about the worldbuilding at play here.
The world (and beyond)
The Stormlight Archive is set on Roshar, a very peculiar planet whose oddities I ran down in the old post. This book did go into more detail about it and its neighbors, Ashyn and Braize, enough that an astute reader can understand what Sanderson is going for here.
Ashyn seems to be the original home of humans in this solar system; they were brought there at some point in the distant past (at least 10,000 years before the books) by Adonalsium, who is finally personalized as some sort of ascended, possibly draconic, being. After he seeded the "Cosmere" with life, some of his cohorts managed to take him down. They split his power into sixteen shards, and Wind and Truth finally has the courage to actually explain this. Through the eyes of the bearer of the Honor shard, no less.
So we finally get some answers I’ve been waiting for since I read that one chapter intro of Hero of Ages that mentioned "this Shard of Adonalsium". It’s about time.
Anyway, Ashyn was where humans lived, until they blew it up and basically turned it into Venus. Braize is a kind of Early Mars analogue that has a curious spiritual power. Roshar, the middle child of the system, is habitable but was also inhabited by the beings who eventually became the Voidbringers, and are now the enemy army of the present day.
Roshar is described in this book as having a kind of mathematical perfection. That makes a lot of pieces click into place for me. That’s why the main—only?—landmass looks like a Julia fractal. That’s why the Shattered Plains have a waveform pattern. That’s why everything seems to be in such…balance.
But humans disturbed that balance by leaving their destroyed homeworld and coming here. I don’t particularly like that concept; it’s very anti-human and reeks of green eco-terrorism. Sanderson tries to deflect it, but he’s not very successful. I’ll return to my thoughts on that at the end of the post.
Beyond this world is an entire galaxy of inhabited planets, some of them with their own Shards whose bearers are quite literally playing God. Because of Roshar’s unique nature, and the fact that it’s home to three of the Shards (Honor, Odium, and the rarely-seen Cultivation), everybody gives it a wide berth.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t references, and here is where the "Cosmere" part comes into play. There are numerous references to the Mistborn series, including a cameo from Demoux, who may or may not be the same B-team captain from those books. And, although I won’t go into detail, the final part of the epilogue even takes place on Scadrial, the Mistborn planet.
It’s ambitious, especially when you add in the last scene of The Lost Metal, which seemed to be going in the opposite direction. But this is where things begin to break down.
The downfall
At times, the interconnected universe Sanderson is weaving starts to come undone. There’s just too much of it, to the point that I would almost say Stormlight Archive is not a self-contained series. Meaning that you have to read his other works to even be able to follow the story at this stage. You’re not going to know who some of the people are, how some of their magic works, or why they’re all here in the first place unless you do. This includes not only Mistborn and Elantris, but also the Stormlight novellas like Edgedancer. I’m not saying it’s a money grab. It’s just an author not knowing how to rein himself in.
That goes for the novel as a whole, though. Weighing in around 1400 pages in hardback, and those printed in a smaller font that gave my failing eyes no end of trouble even with my glasses, Wind and Truth has too much wind for too little truth. The ten-day structure is great for keeping the story moving, but even then it has long stretches where I felt like nothing was really happening.
Some of this comes from Sanderson’s prose, which has not improved to any appreciable extent. He has started including normal English profanity, even when it doesn’t really fit—but he kind of lampoons this at one point, which was nice to see—and still has the occasional Americanism. Some of the characters, especially Maya, talk like I’d expect from Twitter posts rather than a novel with such amazing production quality.
Yes, I was finding some great quotes to send to my girlfriend, like "As I fear not the child with a weapon he cannot lift, I will never fear the mind of a man who does not think." Or "So often, it began with just looking up. That was the first step in clawing free of the darkness." The therapeutic aspect of this book can’t be overstated. Considering I described the cast four years ago as "the DSM-5 in novel form", this is not only appropriate, but welcome.
Apart from such gems, however, the prose generally feels clunky. Too wordy when it needs to be direct, too blunt when it should be descriptive. I don’t know why this is Sanderson’s writing style. It’s the single most infuriating thing about his stories.
The disaster
Well, it was.
Much more in this book, Sanderson has begun inserting not only American figures of speech, but American political topics. Some parts are anti-human. Some are downright woke. At least three named characters came out as gay, which is three more than I can think of in the entirety of his works before this. There’s a general breaking-down of gender roles that permeates the book, an important character who’s a Reddit-tier atheist, and a feel that’s far leftward of anything I remember from the mostly apolitical Mormon I call my favorite author.
Quite possibly the worst bit of progressive ideology in Wind and Truth, however, is the race-blindness. First of all, that’s a very modern concept that doesn’t fit well in a fantasy world to begin with. Second, it’s handled poorly. Real people truly are cognizant of differences in race. Here, though, that recognition is ignored or mocked. Kaladin, for example, is practically berated by his spren companion for noticing and remarking on the much different appearance of those in Shinovar.
You might object by pointing out that the world is embroiled in a fight for survival. Wouldn’t racism be set aside? To a point, yes, but that argument falls flat when you look at the way the "singers" are treated. At every point, even when they aren’t present, humans speak of them with respect and even a hint of reverence. There are no curses, no slurs; they don’t even call them by the name "Parshendi" anymore. There isn’t much of a resistance in the lands they’ve conquered. You get the feeling that some humans like them more than their own species. Considering these are the beings their religion literally depicted as demons, that’s a little hard to swallow.
That’s not the only place where my suspension of disbelief got strained. In the first book of the series, Kaladin and his fellow slaves (as he was at the time) didn’t know anything about the spren, the Cognitive Realm, the healing powers of Stormlight, or any of that. And they were depicted as being average in that regard. Sure, a few people had some hidden knowledge, but even the learned, like Shallan, were largely unaware of their world’s place in the universe.
In Wind and Truth, things are completely different, and that can’t all be attributed to the tumult of the war. Take, for instance, the people of Iri, a backwater rarely mentioned and almost never visited. Somehow they not only know that other worlds exist and are populated by humans, but they have a way to travel into Shadesmar en masse, like a band of gypsies? You’d think that would’ve come out before now, surely.
And that brings me to the ending of both the book and this post. The ending was honestly the worst part of the entire novel. It felt like a letdown, in a way that Sanderson usually doesn’t provide. True, it hit some bittersweet notes, but even those weren’t handled well. Parts of it felt like Empire Strikes Back. Parts felt like I was watching Cartoon Network late on a Saturday night. And parts felt like he just didn’t know where he wanted to put all the major players, so he just kind of…left them stranded.
Maybe the "second arc" of the Stormlight Archive will make that make sense. I hope so. This thing still has five books left to go. In my opinion, Wind and Truth, despite being the biggest one so far, is also the weakest by a wide margin.