Most of the ratings for Words of Radiance are 5 stars so I'm definitely in the minority in regards to my rating. For the largest portion of the book I considered giving it 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 but the last 10-15% really dragged the book down for me.
While there were a few bits in The Way of Kings that dragged for me it was never for long amounts of time, only short single chapters but the same does not apply to Words of Radiance.
The positives:
Kaladin, Adolin and Dalinar are still my favourites and I'm so glad Jasnah is back, because I really want to learn more about her. She's the character I'm most intrigued by and I was bummed that we missed out on so much time with her.
Lift was a fun new character and her powers of creating life was cool to see.
Some of the action sequences, mostly the duels, were well written and had me turning the pages to find out how they ended.
Finding out more about the Knights Radiants and the different orders has been great and I hope we'll learn more about the Heralds as well, because I thought they were all gone but after Telenelat (sp?) was back suddenly Nin was back too?
The negatives:
One of my issues with the book is that the pacing felt wildly off for large portions of the story. Either the story dragged which was especially the case for me for Shallan's chapters this time around. Jasnah "dying" certainly played a huge role in that because Jasnah was what intrigued me most about Shallan's story in the first book. The whole caravan plotline as well as the Ghostbloods didn't interest me because there's still too much unknown. Plus the revelation of Shallan being the one to have killed her mother took way too long. I knew it since the moment it was mentioned in the first book that she was the one who murdered her mother. That fact made her character a bit inconsistent to me, because she can compartmentalize that event like a champ but can't do it with anything else?
There were other parts that put me into a reading slump but Shallan's story was the biggest contributor. Some of those bits could really have used more tightening up.
Then you have the parts that were completely rushed and that needed more space to breathe, like the last 30-40 pages where tons of new info was dropped on the reader and plots set up for book three. There was just too much that I couldn't take in and it honestly didn't make me excited for the next book. And can some of the bad/evil characters actually stay dead? Seeing them return from death every time was so tiring. I'm sure Eshonai isn't dead either based on all of that but she and her sister Venli will probably make a "surprise" return in book three.
Something that I didn't notice as much during book one but which constantly drew me out of book two was the more modern language that was creeping into the dialogue like "Awesome", "cool" and other words. Every time that happened I stumbled over the dialogue and wondered if I'm reading something in our real world. To me it just felt wrong.
Something that's a smaller niggle with me was Jasnah's return. I had to spoil myself to make certain she'd come back because I'm not sure I would have continued the series otherwise. Her return was a whimper and Wit's confusing monologue at the beginning of the Epilogue didn't help.
I definitely need a bit of a break now because I hope the next book won't take the same trajectory as one of Sanderson's other series Skyward took for me where I liked each subsequent book less than the previous one.
3.25/5 stars.