Hey, look, a book review! I haven’t written any in a while, but this series that I finished a while ago really deserves one.

Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer is an epic fantasy series that I must have seen recommended somewhere. Reddit maybe? It is quite epic in scale and I won’t even try to summarize it here.

The foundation of the series is its interesting system of magic. People with the right gift (“drafters”) can turn light into a physical substance called luxin. Different colours of luxin have different properties: green is springy, red is flammable, etc. Those who can “draft” multiple colours are called polychromes, and full-spectrum polychromes are the rarest of all.

There’s a complex world and a complex plot and a lot going on, intrigue and battles both magical and mundane, and plenty of personal drama as well.

Things I particularly liked about the series:

• Gavin’s story. Gavin is the Prism – the most powerful man in the world, a polychrome with extra powers, kind of like the pope and an emperor and supreme mage in one. But he has come to this position by deceit, and he is not who everyone thinks he is, and that is causing him major difficulties. The world has major problems, some of which only he can fix, but he’s distracted by his personal problems. Those personal problems include his new-found bastard son Kip, and his tricky relationship with his beloved Karris. And he acquires plenty more problems throughout the series.
• Brent Weeks’ prose. These books contain so many intense, well-wrought phrases and sentences to savour! There are many nuggets of philosophy and life advice, masterfully expressed. I wish I had taken notes, so I could share some here.

Nevertheless my overall impression of the series is more negative than positive. There are some shortcomings in the plotting and world-building. I can look past those. The series has bigger problems.

• The pacing and intensity. The books are cut up into short chapters, and every single chapter tries to be the most intense one. Reading these books, it felt like every chapter ended in a cliffhanger or a life-altering event. It was a constant flow of “I can never be the same person again” and “this changes everything” and “I will never be able to survive this”. It was as if the emotional intensity knob was turned to eleven for nearly every chapter. After a while it became exhausting. I was interested in the story, I wanted to know what happens next, but I had to put the book down for some days to rest – because there was never any rest in the books themselves. My main feeling when finishing the series was one of relief.
• The shift in focus from Gavin to his son Kip and Kip’s friend Teia. Maybe it wasn’t a shift, maybe this was the case from the beginning and I just got the wrong expectations. I started reading what I thought was adult fantasy but after a while had a YA book in front of me instead. Gavin was an adult with a mature mind and complex adult problems. Kip and Teia were teenagers, whose teenage problems I wasn’t particularly interested in.
• And Kip is annoying. Above all, he is annoyigly Mary Sue-ish. He’s a great drafter, just because. OK, I can give him one natural gift. But then he somehow also turns into a masterful leader and tactician – in his late teens, with little to no life experience, and with no one teaching or guiding him? Come on…
• The deus ex machina solutions in the last book. Religion is an important part of the world of this series, tightly bound to its magic, and Gavin as pope/emperor is naturally particularly involved. He loses faith and finds it again, and much of that is finely written. But in the final battle (because of course there is one!) the good guys are basically saved by God, not once but repeatedly, and that is just silly writing in a book like this.
• Some of the plot twists are too abrupt to make any sense. Gavin turns out to be an unreliable narrator who has apparently forgotten some very important things, and rediscovers them one by one. But it just seems incredible that he would not notice anything odd about himself or his beliefs, and that he could look at thing A and believe that it is thing B which is nothing like thing A. I get the feeling that the author put these twists here just to keep us readers on our toes even more. It doesn’t make the book more interesting, it just adds even more of the “this changes everything” moments, and the books really didn’t need any more of these.