Sanderson continues in his usual fashion of letting his characters linger for the bulk of the book in moral quandry, justice equity and whatever good and upright people do in plots where the line is clearly divided between people who are good and bad. To say this was tiring was an understatement of the century.

For this book, Shallan takes center stage although with how her backstory was unfolded, it just felt pretty pointless to waste that much time on it. I'm still unclear as to why so many pages are dedicated in between the story to just fleshing out a characters past. I understand Dalinar is next in line for a back story *deep frustrated sigh*

Anyways, like its predecessor this book is filled for the most part with absolutely nothing getting done. Characters spend an inordinate amount of time dicking about doing/ deciding what is "right", how people need to follow moral codes.
Kaladin was basically all "lighteyes are bad, can't trust them won't trust them till like the very last (and i mean very last) chapter of this book, Syl was all Kaladin you're so sad, Kaladin smile, Kaladin what's wrong, Kaladin this isn't you. Navani was apparently one of the central characters in this book but you'd be hard pressed to believe that given how little we actually had things from her point of view. Sadeas as a villian was so unoriginal cos what? It also boggles my mind that Dalinar's people were literally walking blind in every single fucking way. Dude had no upper hand with anything. No spies literally had no way of knowing what the people trying to get the upper hand on him were thinking. And everytime they were close to getting bested, Sanderson would introduce something convenient to get them out of it.
Shallan was all shit my family is messed up and i really need to keep my shit together before i unravel and also she's supposed to have this splendid gift of repartee but Sandeson isn't funny so it was mostly cringe.
Side note: Not sure if this was explained in book 1 but how exactly does her taking picture with her eyes ability work?

I quite enjoyed the plot twist that were being dropped until i figured out that was how the whole book was going. So for every part of the book, there would be a minor shocker somewhere in the middle then a major one really close to the end. Kinda got boring when you figured out that you were getting some major plot twist either way. Takes the spontaneity out of the whole thing.
Also Sanderson's prose leaves a lot to be desired and there's just something about the whole religion thing that was way too Christian-ish for me.

All in all just an okay book with loads of page fillers.

2.75 stars