Excellent start to this universe, for all that it took me ages upon ages to finally pick it up. I think this time around I wanted to be a completionist, and read in the correct order. I think, having now finished through #4 and impatiently waiting for #5 to come off of hold at my local library, that it was worth it…even if I didn’t remember half of the Cosmere crossover bits and had to re-read them on Coppermind or via recaps.
But leave all that aside.
Here, at the start of all things, we start small. And we start very certain! A king is assassinated, and leaves behind a cryptic message and bobbles. The words will resonate–a bit–but the bobble will be ignored, which makes us as readers sort of ignore it and assume the words are more important. We’re not wrong per se, the words become Words and then it’s all very important what the Words are etc, but it is a clever sleight of hand to keep your attention where Sanderson wants it to be.
We’re also fighting a very just war as a result! We humans tried to do some negotiation with the Parshendi who turned around and murdered our king. So we’re justified in arriving with an army and fighting them, although the war has been dragging on for a while and turned into a series of tiny skirmishes for battlefield gems which seems to have subsumed the original main point of all the warring. There’s some funny business with eye color being a stand in for race markers and superiority that’s like, odd but maybe in a We Need to Talk About This way? Plus, there’s a surprising amount of enslavement going on amongst the human side that makes it hard to full throated-ly support them?
Right, okay, it seems like maybe this 10-books-in-two-five-book-arc series will have more than a single, easy to define conflict at their heart. But in the meanwhile, we’ve got a lot characters to meet and care about and love. Because there’s no better way to create narrative tension than to have many characters who could die and TEAR YOUR HEART OUT.