Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks
Every legend shines a light
Disclaimer: Spoilers
My primary pursuit over the past two-and-a-half months was reading the Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks. I first heard of these books from Peter Ahlstrom, Brandon Sanderson’s editorial director, née assistant. He wrote a post on Brandon’s website recommending the final book of the series, The Burning White, when it was published in 2019. I proceeded to read the first two books and got partway through the third before stopping and never picking it back up1. This year, the series returned to my consciousness, and I decided to start over and read it in its entirety.
The Lightbringer series is a five-book epic fantasy2 with a cool magic system based on colors, cunning political maneuvering, exciting battle sequences, and real character growth. I enjoyed the reading journey and I would recommend it, but with an asterisk. This is because while I think the first three books are quite strong, the fourth book slides a bit and the fifth book fumbles the ball. I would say that the series is good… for the most part. The world-building and magic system are strong… for the most part. The characters are compelling… for the most part. And there are lots of big plot twists that make sense and pay off… for the most part.
You can stop reading here if you’d like. I really just want to recap and react to all the big moments for myself, since Erik just finished the second book so there’s a lot I can’t talk about with him yet. Major spoilers ahead!
I really like how Gavin Guile is established in the first two books. He is in the prime of his life: powerful, charming, smart. The readers learn about chromaturgy through seeing Gavin’s masterful and creative applications of luxin.
Chromaturgy is cool. Every color has different physiological and physical properties and influences the user in different ways. If I were a drafter, I would like to be able to draft yellow, which strikes a good balance between the passionate warm colors and logical cool colors. But I also like blue and superviolet.
We find out pretty early on that Gavin is actually his younger brother Dazen, who defeated Gavin in a civil war and took his identity. It is also revealed that Gavin is still alive and is secretly being held captive by Dazen underground. Gavin has been imprisoned for 16 years and by the end of Book One, manages to escape the blue prison only to find himself in an identical green one.
I haven’t even mentioned Kip yet, who, along with Gavin (actually Dazen, this is not confusing at all3), is the main character of the series. Kip starts off as the stereotypical unremarkable fat boy from a backwater village who then gets thrust into the middle of everything when he learns that he is the bastard son of GGavin. He unlocks powerful magical abilities and is forced to grow up. In Book One, I found all of Kip’s negative self-talk kind of annoying and depressing, but it is because of that baseline that you can really see Kip mature. Over the course of the series, he makes it into the Blackguard, stands up to Andross Guile, his grandfather, develops deep friendships, and becomes a more self-assured, mature leader.
While Kip has a relatively straightforward character arc, DGavin is much more complicated. You really like him after seeing him give his all to protect the people of Garriston and resettle them on Seers Island, help set Kip up at the Chromeria the best he can, and show the respect to Karris White Oak that his brother did not. But also, he’s been keeping his own brother captive for the past 16 years, does not believe in the religion that grants him his station, and easily got away with murdering (though on accident) a young girl.
You watch GGavin slowly break out of prison after prison and you start to wonder if maybe he’ll become a more major character, perhaps get a redemption arc. And then, in the middle of Book Two, DGavin shoots and kills him. So, never mind.
We meet Zymun, the illegitimate son of GGavin and Karris, and he is a little shit. Yes, he was abandoned by his mother as a baby, and that is sad, but he is a straight up psychopath, no redeeming qualities. His death in Book Five is deserved and not nearly as agonizing as I had hoped. It should have been Karris, his mother, who killed him instead of Quentin, though it was still a cool scene.
The primary antagonist of the series is the Color Prince, who is later called Lord Omnichrome and the White King. He also happens to be the previously-presumed dead older brother of Karris, Koios White Oak. His villain motivation is pretty stereotypical: he wants to destroy the institution and create equality between those with magical powers and those without, except that it gradually turns into a “some people are more equal than others” Animal Farm kind of thing. His death in Book Five is also not as dramatic as I had wanted.
The third antagonist is Andross Guile, father of Gavin and Dazen and grandfather of Kip and Zymun. Now Andross is a morally gray character. He is clever, cunning, manipulative, arrogant, and capable. He is not very nice, so it’s easy to dislike him. However, we eventually see glimpses of vulnerability and humanity. Perhaps there is more than meets the eye! More on Andross later.
After spending Book One at the top of his game and Book Two slightly compromised but still powerful, DGavin spends most of Book Three as a galley slave on a pirate ship, unable to see in color and thus without magic. And then Brent Weeks just continues to put him through hell: at the end of Book Three, he gets one eye burned out by a vindictive leader, is successfully rescued by Karris, and returns to Big Jasper only to be kidnapped by Andross and imprisoned in his own underground cell previously used for GGavin.
Book Three is the highlight of the series for me. In addition to everything that’s happening to DGavin, Teia, former slave and Kip’s Blackguard partner, is recruited as an assassin for the heretic group Order of the Broken Eye because of her ability to draft paryl, an eighth color. She later becomes a double agent for the Chromeria. Karris, who reconciled with DGavin and married him in Book Two, is involuntarily removed from the Blackguard and made the White’s spymistress. Kip discovers a set of original priceless Nine Kings cards and accidentally absorbs them with his magic. This overwhelms him and he falls dead and has a “Harry Potter, Dumbledore, and baby Voldemort” experience with an immortal before he is revived by Teia. Andross assassinates the White and Karris unexpectedly finds herself a nominee to become the next White. Andross also rigged the sacred selection process, but Karris prevails and becomes Karris White. Kip and his Blackguard squad flee the Chromeria and he marries Tisis—right after he and Teia confess their feelings to each other! And lastly, we find out that Blackguard Commander Ironfist is part of the Order of the Broken Eye and that the head of the Order, the Old Man of the Desert, is none other than his uncle and Andross’s slave, Grinwoody.
Teia becomes a major character starting in Book Three. She is made a full Blackguard, hones her skills with paryl, and continues to try and ingratiate herself with the Order while remaining loyal to the Chromeria. As a double agent, Teia walks a fine line and is forced to shed much of her innocence. She questions her purpose: is she a sword or a shield? In Book Five, Teia is forced into hiding and resolves to destroy the Order. At great personal cost, she defeats her master and wipes out a large number of Order members. In the postlude, she finally murders the Old Man of the Desert.
Much of Book Four is about Karris establishing herself as the White, Kip and the Mighty going rogue, and Kip and Tisis’s marriage. This is the book where we really see Kip mature as he finds himself in the position of a leader. Brent Weeks also makes the bold decision to shine a light on vaginismus, which Tisis suffers from.
Meanwhile, Dazen, weak, half-blind, and unable to draft, tries to escape from his own prison cell. We get some of the final major reveals: Dazen is a black drafter (the Black Prism!) and he killed other drafters in order to gain their colors. Dazen actually killed his brother Gavin in their final battle and never imprisoned him. All the chapters we had from the real Gavin’s perspective in the first two books never actually happened! Drafting black luxin destroyed many of Dazen’s memories, so he really has been living a lie in more than one way for the past 16 years (first that he is pretending to be someone he’s not, second that he thought his brother was alive when he’d been dead for years). His parents knew his secret all along but feared he was mad and so went along with it, protecting him the best they could. Some readers accuse these twists of being a retcon, but I think they were executed okay. Finally, though this is only mentioned one time and never brought up again, Andross tells Dazen that Andross actually fathered Kip, not Gavin, making Kip not Dazen’s nephew but his half-brother.
After the bombshell at the end of Book Three of Ironfist being in the Order, he disappears from the story and does not return until the last part of Book Five. I don’t like how he was sidelined after establishing himself as such a beloved character (before the reveal of his betrayal, that is). And when he reappears, he doesn’t really accomplish much besides kill Cruxer, which I am very sad about.
Liv Danavis, Kip’s childhood friend and superviolet drafter, receives several POV chapters throughout the series, but I think her character is pretty weak and her story arc falls flat. I like that she went over to the dark side and never redeemed herself, but overall she is just kind of meh.
Okay, back to Andross. It turns out that he and his wife Felia discovered some prophesies when they were younger and believed that he was the titular Lightbringer. So, everything he has done since then has been to fulfill the prophesy, and he’s done some bad stuff such as sacrifice/kill his own son Sevastian and plan for the real Gavin to die after seven years of being Prism. The somewhat silver lining is that although Dazen has always thought Andross didn’t love him, the truth is that Andross loved him the most and chose him to avoid the fates of his two brothers. I do think Andross redeems himself a bit at the end and I like the complexity of his character, but everything is tied up a little too neatly for me.
So, is Andross the Lightbringer? Or is it Kip, who people think is the Lightbringer? Or Dazen, the first natural Prism to be born (instead of created through child sacrifice—another dark secret) in centuries? It turns out the answer is yes! You’re the Lightbringer, and you’re the Lightbringer, and they are all the Lightbringer! Yeah, I didn’t love this conclusion.
The reason I think Book Five fumbles the ball is what many other readers cite as well: deus ex machina. God is real, and he literally flies in on something he calls a “machina” to save the day. The magic system that has up until now been relatively law-abiding can now accomplish whatever the story needs through unexplained means. Kip dies and is raised back to life. Dazen’s powers are restored. It’s a happy ending, but I think that is incongruent with the dark themes prevalent in the series.
But, to end on something I like about the Lightbringer series other than what I have already mentioned, the friendship between the members of the Mighty is heartwarming and their dialogue is hilarious.
An odd move in hindsight, because Book Three turned out to be my favorite of the series.
Called a pentalogy. Everything that’s not a trilogy is awkward to say.
People on r/LightbringerSeries use the abbreviations “DGavin” and “GGavin” and so will I.