Things Must Break to Become Stronger - A Review of The Wall of Storms

The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When it comes to series, especially dense, long-running fantasy series, I am always worried that the next book will not live up to the ones that came before it. I call it “middle book syndrome”, from the notion that the middle (i.e. second) book in a trilogy is generally not as good as the first or the third. The best writers try to avoid this, of course, but they do sometimes fall victim to it - my most recent experience was with The Obelisk Gate, the second book in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy.

However, when a writer gets the pace just right, it is possible to avoid this issue in the second or even succeeding books (though I’ve yet to read a series wherein this does not happen at all). There have been more than a few authors who’ve managed to do this (including Jemisin: her book The Broken Kingdoms is the second in her Inheritance Trilogy and is my personal favourite in the entire series), and it always makes me happy when I encounter an author who can sustain the strength of their series into the second book, and hopefully into the succeeding books of their series.

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