Rhythm of War: Book Four of The Stormlight Archive Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Brandon Sanderson (Author), Kate Reading (Narrator), Michael Kramer (Narrator),

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"Powerhouse narrating duo Michael Kramer and Kate Reading bring their outstanding skills to this stunning continuation of the Stormlight Archive series... This audiobook is truly a masterpiece of story and performance." (AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner)

An instant number-one New York Times best seller and a USA Today and Indie best seller!

The Stormlight Archive saga continues in Rhythm of War, the eagerly awaited sequel to Brandon Sanderson's number-one New York Times best-selling Oathbringer, from an epic fantasy writer at the top of his game.

After forming a coalition of human resistance against the enemy invasion, Dalinar Kholin and his Knights Radiant have spent a year fighting a protracted, brutal war. Neither side has gained an advantage, and the threat of a betrayal by Dalinar’s crafty ally Taravangian looms over every strategic move.

Now, as new technological discoveries by Navani Kholin’s scholars begin to change the face of the war, the enemy prepares a bold and dangerous operation. The arms race that follows will challenge the very core of the Radiant ideals, and potentially reveal the secrets of the ancient tower that was once the heart of their strength.

At the same time that Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with his changing role within the Knights Radiant, his Windrunners face their own problem: As more and more deadly enemy Fused awaken to wage war, no more honorspren are willing to bond with humans to increase the number of Radiants. Adolin and Shallan must lead the coalition’s envoy to the honorspren stronghold of Lasting Integrity and either convince the spren to join the cause against the evil god Odium, or personally face the storm of failure.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books

Listening Length

57 hours and 26 minutes
Author

Brandon Sanderson
Narrator

Kate Reading, see all
Audible release date

Nov. 17 2020
Language

English
Publisher

Macmillan Audio
ASIN

B082FN97JY
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	57 hours and 26 minutes
Author	Brandon Sanderson
Narrator	Kate Reading, Michael Kramer
Audible.ca Release Date	November 17 2020
Publisher	Macmillan Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B082FN97JY
Best Sellers Rank	#344 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #5 in Military Fantasy #25 in Action & Adventure Fantasy #44 in Fantasy Action & Adventure

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5

37,576 global ratings

5 star		83%
4 star		13%
3 star		3%
2 star		1%
1 star		1%

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Cardinal

Projected 10 book series?

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 11, 2022

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There is no doubt Brandon Sanderson is a good writer and his talent will keep people entertained. My issue is that I have read there may be 10 books in the Stormlight Archive series and he's just published the 4th. The mistak is mine, I read somewhere that it was book 4 in the 4 book series and bought the 4th book. It's a very long wait, and would not have bought it since I'm close to 70, I will never read full set. Sometimes it feels like we are meant to be kept engaged for 10 yrs or so, for a "make work" program. Some authors take an extremely long time to get out their next book, in no hurry. It's a kind of arrogance when their followers wait and wait. I know my point is a criticism, but I do not mean it to be. Steven Erikson happens to be my favorite writer, but I was fortunate because when I found his books, they were well along, so I bought the whole lot, feeling good I'd have an excellent time absorbed in reading - not spending yrrs or decades for a word from our sponsor. For me personally, I think asking people waite yrs and yrs is asking a lot.

2 people found this helpful

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Aiden Hartery

Great instalment in the series.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 23, 2022

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Another great novel to the stormlight series. I’ve seen a lot of mixed reviews on this one, but don’t let it dissuade you. There is a LOT of exploration of the magic system, which seems to turn some people off. This novel really seems to turn up the ‘cosmere’ themes more so than any of the previous novels. There’s more tie ins to other cosmere novels, which is great to see. It does slow down in the middle, and there is a lot of ‘down’ moments for at least 3 characters (which is another reason why people get turned off). I believe it is all necessary to the story. I think this book best serves as a massive build up to book 5, which will be the final instalment of the first big arc of the series. So book 5 should be bonkers, and I think that it will be so strong because of all the building up book 4 does. Enjoy!

One person found this helpful

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Matthew

Long winded and frankly, boring. Much like my review...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 20, 2020

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On the kindle, I didn't like how it was to easy to skip to the table of contents at the beginning of each chapter and lose your spot. I found most of the story to be boring, as is mentioned in most of the negative reviews there is too much about mental health. Kaladin has become the most dry character to read about as he takes an entire book to overcome the same issues he has to every other book so far. He was basically a shell of kaladin, he is definitely not my favorite character anymore. Shallan has lost all intrigue and falls under the same issue as kaladin, long winded whiney story about the same issue that, guess what, take the entire book for her to overcome. Sound familiar? Navani, has some serious development in character but the story becomes dry since its all about the experiments and her plotting to work against the fused. Adolin who was another favorite of mine has lost all forward movement in his character.
Nothing really happens through 80% of the book, literally everyone is the in the same location they were after the intro. The start was exciting and engaging, the end was predictable and almost flat as it was set up to be a cliff hanger, again... but it wasn't that shocking. I guess the main theme is that as far as everyone has come, almost every character STILL isn't sure where they fit in the world since becoming radiants. Also they focused on Venli so much and I really don't care about her. The back story of her felt redundant and really didn't explain much except justify her behaviour. She also complains all book too, no surprise there.
This book just fell flat. As others have mentioned; book 1 and 2 were impossible to put down and raced ahead with story, action conflict and character development. Book 3 was starting to show fatigue and book 4 has flagged and given up the race completely.
Brandon Sanderson, please look at the negative comments of this book and get back to that engaging story writing you had before so book 5 can be epic again.
Make the Stormlight series great again.
ps. Huge fan, have read 90% of your works, would love to stay interested in this series.

9 people found this helpful

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Vic VE3YT

Lighten up on the mental health issues Brandon

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 28, 2021

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I hadn't read any Brandon Sanderson until five months ago, and read through the four Stormlight Archive books close together. I really liked Rhythm of War and think it might be the best of the series so far. I liked the technical-sounding experiments Navani and Raboniel were performing, and thought the detail was essential to their interwoven friendship/hatred and struggle/collaboration. In fact, I wish there had been more time for Raboniel to provide Navani more of the intricacies and caveats of immortality. I didn't feel that the story arc stalled in time, as many other reviewers have said. The Eshonai, Venli and Jaxlim back history was brilliant, and I didn't see that "humanity" of the Listeners coming out of the first three books. In a way, things could have slowed down so we could find out more about a lot of other characters. I would have liked more focus on Cultivation and the Mink. However, the parts that made me close the book and go to sleep some nights, instead of staying up later turning pages, were the seemingly repetitive (to me anyway) descriptions of Kaladin's darkness and depression, and Shallan's multiple personalities. Maybe it was necessary to mire us in that for so much of the book in order to create the positive emotions when they popped out the other end. But i don't think so. I read escapist fiction for emotional resonance, and those were long periods of non-resonance for me, Mr. Sanderson. Otherwise, a really fun read, impressive in its length, scope, and the degree to which I became immersed. Thank you.

One person found this helpful

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The Sanderlanche was totally worth it course, but the first 90% was a chore

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 24, 2021

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For the first 90% of this book, I had to literally force myself to read at least a chapter a day, or I would never have gotten through it. It took a couple months. Very dry, very tedious, very much like studying for a technical class in high school you know you'll never get a job in.

With that said, the Sanderlanche at the climax was totally worth it, and I'll continue to give perfect ratings to all books in this series as long as Sanderson keeps making them. I do think Sanderson could stand to make the 90% a bit less of a chore, but I'm not sure how. I wonder if he knows for sure that the tedious majority of the book is needed to make those endings really hit home?

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Top reviews from other countries

Barry Mulvany

Good instalment and a bit different than previous books

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 2, 2020

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So the next instalment of the Stormlight Archives is done, it was a beast of a book as expected but overall I enjoyed it.

I won't say much about the plot except that it's set around a year after book three and mainly follows Kaladin, Navani and Venli. Shallan has a fair few POV's as well though not as many as the others and the rest of the main characters just have a few bits here and there.

Unusually, so far anyway, the flashbacks weren't as prominent as they have been in other books and only started in part three. That meant that the vast majority of the book was set in the present day timeline. You would expect that meant the plot moved forwards loads but it didn't really. This was very much an introspective book and so though we had a lot of character development, the plot didn't move forward all that much.

So the heart of this book is about self realisation. Kaladin is severely traumatised and needs to learn to take a step back. Shallan is even more messed up and has to come to an understanding with herself. Venli is trying to live with what she's done while moving on to what she is to become and Navani is trying to balance her responsibilities as a ruler with her desire and skill as a scholar. It's an unusual book in that respect and fair play to Sanderson for tackling such issues in a truly epic fantasy setting.

Saying that parts of it I felt dragged a bit. The parts with Navani and Raboniel were some of my favourite bits but it got very technical in places and I found myself glazing over it. Some people are probably going to love it though. This book also got very cosmere heavy which is both a good and a bad thing. Myself twenty years ago would have absolutely loved it, I had the time to constantly re-read my favourite books and I'm sure I would have read all three again in preparation for this. However me nowadays still loves it but since I've only read most of his books once, I was constantly wondering what bits of the cosmere he was talking about and if I should know certain names etc. I know the most obvious ones but I'm sure I missed loads and the significance of some stuff we found out. It is still pretty great and again this will be an added bonus for others.

As you will expect if you've read any of his other books, Sanderson has ended it with a bang (which I'm still thinking about) and now must wait patiently for another three years until the next one. This time I will re-read them as it will be the final part of this arc.

17 people found this helpful

A. Whitehead

Something of a return to form after the slog of the third book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 21, 2021

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The war between the forces of Odium, a dark god who desires ultimate power over the Cosmere, and the Knights Radiant is continuing to escalate. The Knights Radiant have conquered the ancient tower-city of Urithiru and are using it as an impregnable stronghold to wage war on Odium's forces. Dalinar Kholin forms an alliance with a skilled general and decides to mount an attack on Odium's armies to the south, whilst his son Adolin embarks on a dangerous mission into the other-dimensional realm of Shadesmar to seek an alliance with the honorspren, a task complicated by ancient crimes committed by humanity against them. Kaladin Stormblessed, the greatest soldier in Dalinar's armies, finds himself granted a leave of absence to deal with his own battle stress and self-doubt. But Odium is not beaten yet and takes advantage of Dalinar's absence from Urithiru to put a bold plan into motion.

Rhythm of War is a lot. It's the latest in a lot of books: this is the fourth of ten planned books in the Stormlight Archive series and the twelfth of a planned thirty-odd books in the wider Cosmere universe. It's a lot of pages: at more than 1,200 pages this is the longest epic fantasy novel published since the previous volume in the series, Oathbringer, which in turn was possibly the longest fantasy novel published in over a decade. It's a lot of characters, with dozens of major and minor characters playing important roles in the story. It's also a lot of worldbuilding, with fabrials and Shardplate and voidlight and stormlight and half a dozen different magic system employing different principles being discussed at chapter-stretching length (not helped by the three-year gap since the last book in the series; keeping the Stormlight wiki on standby during reading may be advisable). This is not a series for the faint-hearted or the short of time.

Rhythm of War is also, it is pleasing to report, a stronger novel than its forebear, arresting a slight decline in quality that the series had been suffering since the start. The Way of Kings was a strong novel which set up an unusual, alien setting with an interesting story and worldbuilding and characters who were among Sanderson's best. Words of Radiance was almost as good, but suffered some pacing issues. These pacing issues became overwhelming in Oathbringer, a relatively simple and focused novel that was diffused and made more complicated than it needed to be by immense amounts of worldbuilding and backstory discussions that, strictly speaking, didn't really need to be in the book.

Rhythm of War shores up a building that was, if not in danger of collapse, starting to list under its own weight. The novel is helped by dropping the completely self-contained side-stories that appeared in previous novels and by setting up very clear stories around its four main characters: Venli, Shallan, Kaladin and Navani (with Dalinar, Wit, Adolin and Lift having reasonably important secondary roles). Each story is told clearly and intersects with the others in a well-laid out manner, with Sanderson expending a lot of energy on making these characters jump off the page more than previously.

It's also a heavy novel, in the sense that both Shallan and Kaladin's stories revolve around mental health, stress, PTSD and other issues revolving around personality disorders and the need for good mental health practice. It's a strong theme that was touched on in the previous books but becomes a major plot point in this novel. It's welcome to see a contemporary issue being fleshed out in a fantasy novel in a respectful and mostly well-handled way. However, given the novel has come out in the middle of a global pandemic and many readers will be suffering stress and pressure as a result, readers should be forewarned going into the book that it is tackling weightier-than-normal themes for the author.

The clear demarcation and semi-equal screen time between the four leads helps tremendously in overcoming the pacing issues from the previous novel (thinking of this more as four much more reasonably-sized 300-page novels, each focused on a strong lead character, helps).

That said, problems remain. There are immense stretches of time, especially in the Navani storyline, where characters sit around and discuss worldbuilding issues between them. The idea of characters in a epic fantasy novel acting like scientists and trying to work out how the magic of the world works in an experimental manner is really interesting, but the novel does feel it goes a bit overboard as we see people using magnets and beakers to try to catch stormlight and voidlight in bulbs and do weird things with them. It's a cool idea that is overindulged in.

In addition, the splitting of time between the characters feels a bit uneven at times, with the Shallan/Adolin/Shadesmar plot benched for the entire central third or so of the novel because the author ran out of things for them to do. That's a reasonable solution and better than giving them filler, but it's a bit odd that Shallan is a such a hugely important character at the start and end of the novel but then completely vanishes between.

There's also a perennial Sanderson problem that he's improved on a lot book-by-book but still pops up at odd moments, namely that Sanderson is traditionally a writer who works from the head rather than the heart. There are sections in this book that do feel more like they've come from the heart, excellent action sequences as characters confront old enemies or moments of major character revelation, but some of the book feels studied, analysed and written with something of an absence of passion. This is particularly notable whenever Odium appears live on-page. The Dark Lord showing up to confront the characters (even in a vision where they can't touch or fight one another) should be a major event, but pretty much every time this happens some kind of odd debate on rules of conduct unfolds; the last such major confrontation has all the tension of Odium and Dalinar debating the small print of a text like two opponents who've paused a board game to check the rules online to see if an odd move is allowed. There is a last-minute, genuinely impressive plot twist that might change this for future books, but that remains unproven for now.

Rhythm of War (****) is a stronger novel than the one that came before it and continues to display Sanderson's strengths to full effect: immensely detailed, convincing worldbuilding, solid action and a logical, considered development of the plot, as well as interesting characters. Some of his weaknesses remain, such as a tendency to overwrite, occasionally getting bogged down in the minutiae of the setting and a lack of writing flair in some scenes which doesn't sell big events as much as they should be sold. But it's hard not to remain impressed by the sheer size and scope of the story he is telling here.

13 people found this helpful

J. L. Merritt

Disapointed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 26, 2020

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So many interesting characters but in this book I didn't feel they really went anywhere, nothing new was really revealed and I felt the book wasn't worthy of the authors talent. I expected so much more, Kaladin - one of the best characters in modern fantasy fiction - I wanted to kick him up the ...... , Shaladin a great female hero was the same as well as Jasnah. Releasing Dawnshard at the same time (which you should read before this book) was a bad move. I love this series, I've recommended it to so many people who have enjoyed it. The only real new point was Adolin in Shadesmar which wasn't long enough. Sadly this book didn't do much for me. However I can't wait for the next one

13 people found this helpful

M COOP

Mental health issues and some stormlight story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 27, 2020

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Get ready to jump into this long book, full of...
'General but no specific spoilers'
deep depression and Schizophrenic split personality disorder, on a roller coaster ride of a story dealing with mental health issues, long extremely drawn out 'scientific experiments' and best of all, almost no actual movement of characters physical location or trails.
In this insanely detailed book of personal growth? Of three characters, watch out for the trap of believing three books were enough to understand the characters strengths and their very well detailed weaknesses, as this will take you down to the depths of how to write an extensive book detailing Internal issues.

So, what was good?.
The ending was split 50% between truly brilliant and 50% wtf.
I better understanding of the world building that is happening.
A Bond that is starting to be be reawakened.

And the bad.
Almost no movement of the storyline and I mean actual physical movement
A complete continuation of mental health issues to the point of almost not caring anymore.
Trying to make a specific character story line in any way have any importance or interest while not actually doing anything!.
A focus on the minutiae of stormlight and experiments to the detriment of the story

9 people found this helpful

Idaho Mum

Great book that Amazon made difficult to read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 29, 2020

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I am loving the book thus far, but wanted to give my frustration with Amazon itself not adding Whispersync capability to the book. It's a massive book, and I have some reading challenges, so I need to use Audible recordings and be able to sync them with my written versions I can follow in Kindle. For this reason, I always buy both versions from Amazon. Every other Sanderson book is able to sync between Audible and Kindle, but this book can't. It takes me forever to find my place, and it makes it hard to keep up. I also can't play the recording and have my Kindle app follow the text at the same time in the way it usually does. Bad form, Amazon! I keep coming in here to see if it's an oversight that someone will correct.

6 people found this helpful

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