PEAK. absolute peak. bridge four made me a person who cries at books

ok so I know everyone says this one is slow to start and honestly they are RIGHT, the opening chunk is Kaladin being sad in a hole and Shallan doing library admin, and I genuinely nearly bounced off it in 2019, put it down for four months. picked it back up on a train to Manchester because my phone had died — and that was that. gone. absolutely gone.

what nobody tells you is that the slowness is doing something. it is digging the hole so that when he climbs out of it you feel every single inch of the climb. by the back third the payoff is so enormous that I actually stood up. I was standing up in my living room at half eleven at night holding a hardback like an idiot and my flatmate came out to see what was wrong.

the interludes!! everyone skips them and everyone is wrong! half of them pay off books later and the other half are the actual worldbuilding. Priyesh skips them and then asks me questions in the group chat and I refuse to answer him on principle.

Szeth is terrifying in a way fantasy villains usually are not, because he does not want to be doing any of it and cannot stop. and the vision sequences are the best mystery-box structure I have seen since Dark Souls item descriptions, you get handed lore in fragments and you assemble it yourself and nobody ever stops to explain it to you. that is my exact favourite thing.

the magic system is obviously insane and I refuse to be normal about it.

did a reread on audio at 1.4x, Kramer and Reading are great though his Kaladin voice takes a bit of getting used to.

anyway. ten. it was always going to be a ten. my group chat has heard more about this book than about my actual life and I'm fine with that.