That’s right, it’s time for another Stormlight Archive book review. This time I’ll be tackling the second book in the series, “Words of Radiance.” The great Brando Sando has really blessed us with this one. I’m going to say right now that this is my favorite book in the Stormlight Archive so far and I highly recommend it. You should know how book reviews work as you probably should have read my review on the first book of the series. If you haven’t, well then welcome to the Stormlight Archive – it’s gonna be a good time.

Let’s start with the prologue where we see that iconic assassination that we also saw in the prologue in the first book. This time however we see it from a different perspective,  from none other than the daughter of the man who is being killed, Jasnah. we get some new insights into this world as we always do in the prologue. This prologue was a lot weaker than the other, much less memorable and just doesn’t have the same entertainment factor as the last one. 

In this book we see the true development of the world and it goes from the  weird fantasy world of “Way of Kings” to the all out craziness and bizarreness that the rest of this series could contain. We get a lot of world building character development and we get to see the main characters absolutely obliterate opponents with their new found powers. 

You remember Kaladin, the main character from the last book. Well he’s back and more powerful than ever. Kaladin really takes a step forward with his surgebinding this book. He not only learns to fly and stick people to walls, but in one of the most epic moments in fantasy history takes on four shard bearers with nothing but a spear and some help from a friend. 

Surprisingly we have a switch in the main characters switching from Kaladin to another character, Shallan. Last book she spent her time stealing some magic orbs from Jasnah to help her family with their debts after their dad died, so this book follows her gaining surgebinding abilities. She goes through all the character development and changes that fantasy characters have to go through, this is definitely her book more than any other characters, we get to dive into her backstory and see some cool moments. 

What really jumps this book over others for me is the ending. Now this author is very good at endings. I’ve read a couple other novels he wrote and the endings have always been satisfying. But so much happened in just about the last 50 pages of text it was amazing I remember exactly where I was when I read it and remember my exact thoughts. This is so cool! I wish I could explain the ending in detail, but that would totally spoil it so I won’t do that and just say it was incredible.

Another good thing is that I didn’t really feel the need to skip past any of the characters’ chapters like I did in the last book. I think they all got a good amount of entertaining moments and didn’t want to skip past anything. 

I think the mark of a really good book is if you ever feel the need to get up from your seat and pump your fist from excitement then it’s a good book. This book had not just one but multiple of those moments.

This novel is one of the best rated novels in the world having an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 on Goodreads, giving it the best average rating over 100,000 reviews.

“Words of Radiance” is an incredible novel. The entertainment is through the roof, the characters are incredibly lifelike and trust me you’re going to get attached, I have almost no complaints not even the length, which again is over 1,000 pages. I’m not going to say this is my favorite book ever because I can’t have one. There are so many different genres and styles that picking just one is impossible. What I will say is that this is a top three fantasy book of all time, maybe even number one for me.