Preparing for Oathbringer

In just two weeks, the third book of Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive, Oathbringer, will be released to the world. It hasn’t been a long wait (just three years since Words of Radiance came out) but it still feels like it’s been too long.

If you’re as big of a Stormlight fan as we are, you might already have your signed copy pre-ordered. If you haven’t, there are still a few places online that have copies, and Brandon Sanderson usually sells signed copies of his books after their release on his website.

If you’ve haven’t taken the dive into the massive series that is The Stormlight Archive, this is a great time to do it. With A Song of Ice and Fire and The Kingkiller Chronicles on indefinite hiatus, this is the biggest ongoing fantasy series right now. Sanderson’s vision for the series is ambitious—two five-book arcs that combine to make a ten-book series, with each novel clocking in around 1,000 pages. Why would anyone put themselves through such a long and sprawling series that won’t be finished for another twenty years? Well, because waiting is exciting. And, if Oathbringer and subsequent books in the series match the quality of the first two books, Stormlight will continue to dominate the fantasy genre for years to come.

Unlike a lot of modern fantasy, Stormlight is hopeful and heroic, and the material is PG to PG-13, which is a breath of fresh air. Sanderson himself describes it as his love letter to the fantasy genre, and it shows. The world of Roshar is a worldbuilding masterpiece, with its most prominent feature being the diverse races and the massive storm that rolls across the planet every few days. The first two books are overflowing with magic and filled with heroes of all types. Don’t be intimidated by their length—think of each book as a single trilogy; there several books’ worth of characters and plots in each.

So if you’re counting the days until November 14th like we are, you can pass the two weeks by reading the 30 preview chapters posted on Tor.com, or you can read Warbreaker, which has some tie-ins to the series. If you need a refresher, Tor has an outstanding summary of the first two books.

To celebrate the release of this massive fantasy epic, we will be posting reviews of each part of Oathbringer as we read them. We hope you’ll join us on this journey!