I’m a fan of Brandon Sanderson’s work, and have read many of his series. That said, I’m going to wait before I get into this particular series. For one, it seems to be a a huge time investment. Even the ‘novellas’ in the series are novel sized by typical standards. And I imagine the series will take a decade or more to finish. I usually forget the plot points when I take a long break in a series. More than once I’ve reread initial books of a series, because I had forgotten so much with years of gap. And so now I prefer to read series that have finished.

But even if I keep all of those concerns aside, what holds me back the most is that reviews of the latest book have been quite bad. Of course, I haven’t read the books so I don’t have specifics, but from what I could glean, the general consensus seems to be that the latest book should have gone through extensive slimming. It’s too long for its own good, with the plot not doing justice to its length. ‘Sanderson needs to change his editor’, seems to be a common theme among reviews.

Also, this might be contentious, but too many reviews mention that Sanderson is slipping into preachy territory — not that I mind left wing/ ‘woke’ politics, but ham-fisted attempts at pushing an ideology can degrade the quality of any work. I do not know whether this is true of the latest book. So I’m reserving judgment; just sharing a common complaint that I came across.

I do believe good authors can write bad books on occasion (I can go on and on about the astonishing quality gap between the best and worst books by John Grisham, for example). And so I’m probably going to sit on this series for another decade or whatever time it takes for it to finish. And I will try to gauge via spoiler-free reviews to see how well the series holds up as a whole.

I do not believe Sanderson will pull a vanishing act like GRRM or Patrick Rothfuss. If anyone can be relied upon to finish a series, it’s Sanderson. And Sanderson usually finishes his series strong. So I’m holding out hope that it’ll turn out to be worth the time in the end.