Wind and Truth

"Well now," Dieno said. "That's a finale."

Maybe it's childhood nostalgia, but every once in a while I get that urge to read a giant fantasy tome, and Brandon Sanderson's work always hits that mark for me. It's never going to be world shattering fiction for me, but it's fun to get lost in the adventure, intricate worldbuilding, and large cast of characters.

Overall, my feelings are that Wind and Truth is a quite solid final book for a five book fantasy series. It sticks the landing on major character arcs and themes, and hits quite satisfying expected (and unexpected) plot moments. One thing it does really well is touching back on previous moments to show new information, as plot points, or as a foil for character changes. On the negative side, this book is an incredibly hefty tome and while it feels like it had a lot of editing and the pacing is consistent (but arguably slow), it's hard not to wonder what else could have been trimmed.

That's the summary. Here's a lot more rambling if you need a jumble of other opinions:

This book may be book five in a five book series, but if we zoom out it's series one of two, and if you zoom out further there's a constellation :drum: of other series and series of series that interconnect in Sanderson's cosmere universe. Personally, I am neutral (at best) and often negative on the costs of these inter-book connections. Sure, your universe has magical world hoppers, but I don't need them showing up in a story that's not about that.

I value "tight" stories and closure, where pieces have a purpose towards the aim of the story at hand. Characters and concepts from different stories make the immediate story feel loose. They are literal loose ends, with characters that we don't know and who don't show up again. If you were writing this series to end conclusively and stand independently on its own, you would absolutely make drastic edits. In this book alone, you would hypothetically cut the Shattered Plains entirely, arguably Zahel and friend, Thaidaker and the Ghostbloods, the Iri people, the dawn shards. However, this additional constraint of plot hooks for other stories or to tease tiny world building details feel like a fundamental part of the structure of Sanderson's cosmere fiction. For some readers who read and wiki-ify every lore crumb, I'm sure these are exciting to puzzle or theorize about.

On the positive side, Ben Kelly makes a great point that Sanderson writes with "fractal detail", such that if you miss some or even all references you can still appreciate the larger thrust of the story. The flip side is that to make that fractal possible, these referential and out of band world building details necessarily can't be important to the story at hand. Even in rare cases where side characters get to be part of the plot (Wit mostly, Zahel sorta), there's no room for character development because it just ain't their story. At best, readers can go "hey, I remember that guy". It's a subset of the extended universe problem or "the gang's all here" problem where you have too many characters and can't focus on all of them (and so one might ask why are they there, and what purpose are they serving).

Length-wise, this book is quite the hefty tome, weighing in at some 1300 pages and a 300mb epub, and that's with no appendixes or extra story tacked on. I still think there were some good editing choices here, although I wonder if readers who want their power fantasy action scenes will be disappointed by the number of elided events and the focus on feelings. For example, to me it's a point in the story's favor that we only see Adolin's reaction to (spoiler elided) or how one chapter opens with a "so yeah we beat Yelig-nar again, aaanyways moving on". Neither of these action scenes would likely have furthered the themes of the story or added characterization (that couldn't have been done elsewhere).

Although there's many point of view characters, each book in this series prioritizes a different one to focus on their back story. In this one, we get to see Szeth's childhood and his path to becoming truthless. Sadly for me, the whole Szeth storyline past and present is probably the weakest point of view. Some of this is due to the delineated path his present self is on and the limited amount of revelations we get about his character or the world through his view. It's not that I didn't enjoy it or I thought it was bad, but it just felt a lot weaker in comparison to Dalinar or Shallan's back story. Thematically, the ideas around laws, oaths, and choices resonate well with the rest of the book, but the plot itself didn't capture me as much as I would have wanted in the final book in a series. I think some of this is also the heavy handedness of the language around Kaladin trying to literally be a therapist to Szeth. (Maybe also it's just jarring for me for books to use the word "therapist" and "boundaries" in a fantasy world.) This is not the only part of the book that feels heavy handed and moralizing, it's just the one that sticks out the most to me.

My memory is poor, but I think also that this is the first book that has had queer (or at least gay) characters. It feels a bit like Sanderson is trying to stretch a little bit as a writer (especially one who is very publicly Mormon). Some bits work less well for me, in that there is an aside about some trans Azish recruits that we never hear from again. I don't need every story where characters have some minority identity to revolve around that identity, but I think I'm a little sensitive as a reader to anything that feels adjacent to a diversity checkbox, where that fact isn't integrated into the rest of the story very well and feels tacked on. On the positive side, I think the major gay relationship in this book works really well, as those characters have plenty of other things going on such that they are not the "gay" characters. If anything, I'd say thematically them being gay adds to their feelings of being othered in different ways that really works.

(I would be incredibly curious to read a take from plural systems or autistic folks about representation in these books.)

That's all the non-spoilery thoughts I've got.