I'm well more than a year late to the party, but I've shown up in my best bow tie.

(Bow ties are cool.)

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, but The Way of Kings is an excellent book. In many ways, yes, it is the prologue to a ten-book series. It features a slow build that may put some people off, leading up to an explosive final hundred pages where multiple things fall together, satisfying action scenes take place, multiple resolutions intertwine, the overall story of the series starts to reveal itself, and big, badass setups for the future fall like hammer blows or gunshots. Very satisfying.

But back to where I started. There's a slow buildup, but I didn't find it off-putting whatsoever. The world Sanderson has built is fascinating and unique, with features and cultures and plants and animals and landscapes you've never seen before. Just as the world of the Mistborn books was altered by the ever-present mists, so too is this world skewed from our normal perceptions by a weather feature known as highstorms. They have sculpted the land, its ecology, and its people, but as with the mists, we don't yet truly know what they are or why they happen.

The result is easily Sanderson's most interesting world to date. It is huge and varied and interesting in ways that the world of Mistborn simply wasn't. Nothing here is standard fantasy worldbuilding fare. It's all very cool and cohesive.

The world builds slowly alongside the plot, feeding the reader pieces of the mystery one at a time. The mystery of how this world works and why it is this way runs alongside the mysteries in the plot, and both likely connect to the same overall explanation that will be revealed in the future. I found it endlessly fascinating, even when the plot was moving slowly.

Slow as it may be at times, Sanderson's writing is essentially the same as always, so if you like it (as I do), you still will, and if you don't like it, this book won't change your mind. His dialogue is improved over the sometimes-clunky stylings of Mistborn, to the point where I didn't really notice it, but every now and then a character will say something in a way that just doesn't sound right, jarring you out of the flow for just a moment. Still, as I said, it's a marked improvement.

The plot builds up to multiple wonderful sequences, and as you know, Sanderson does big culminating sequences like nobody's business, painting you pictures that move in your head like a film.

There are three main characters, none of them connected at the beginning, and multiple interesting side-characters. Each character is presented in a different way, their story told according to their own perspective and through different lenses. None of them will twist your heart and invade your soul, but they are solid and satisfying. Each of them has a secret, and the resolutions of those secrets make for some excellent mysteries or buildups.

There's more I could say, but ultimately, if you like strong, interesting, visual epic fantasy, big fantasy done well without falling into cliche, you owe it to yourself to get in on this series even though it will be some time before it's finished. I'm an unapologetic fan of Sanderson's work and thus not the most unbiased source, but for what it's worth, this series has become a day one hardcover purchase for me from here on out.

P.S. Yes, it has a cool new magic system. In fact it appears to have at least two of them, and one is practically built for an epic action movie. It's a Sanderson book, cool magic should be a given.