Review: Oathbringer

Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the things that has always impressed me about Sanderson, is that he writes about these detailed original worlds, and yet he does so very organically; he somehow avoids the "turn-to-the-camera-and-deliver-a-history-lesson" Council of Elrond moments, where the entire history of the world is spelled out for the reader in a massive wall of text with no story in it. Sanderson instead is very good at telling you a story and giving you snippets of world around the edges of it, until you piece together a picture of it yourself from the fragments.

Until now.

I mean, I guess it's still impressive that he mostly avoided the setting-dump until the third book? But the first half of this sizable volume is just one long series of lore articles, with no plot to speak of, and couched in a minimum of framework. It's interesting and original lore still, but it's unloaded on the reader relentlessly en-masse, so it gets a bit dry, and we kind of miss our characters, who might as well not be present at all.

By the second half of the book, the characters come storming back and give us a grand tale if you can stay awake that long, so that's all right. They struggle with their inner demons almost as much as they struggle with the external threats, which has always been part of the appeal of the series to me. The character of Odium - the Big Bad - is finally developed a bit and is a little underwhelming, but overall there is a fine book in here... starting on about page 600.

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