I have pretty mixed feelings about The Wall of Storms. Ken Liu is doing something amazing with The Dandelion Dynasty. And I like a lot of it, but some of the way that he organizes the stories really irks me. I really liked the first half of WoS, which was primarily politics, dealing with factions, and figuring out how to administer an empire. And I loved that. I think the worldbuilding really shone in this, and there were some great character moments. But then Liu shifts to a different character for several hundred pages, we introduce other parts of the world, go back in time, etc. And it all builds to an epic battle during which we learn about yet more things that have been going on in the background but that affect the battle. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of those details, but I wanted that information at a different time. For me, this book would have been better if there were alternating POVs instead of sticking with one or two people for several hundred pages. And I would have appreciated a lot of the discoveries to be built in from earlier on so that they didn't disrupt the flow later. I think this is harder to do, but I think that these two things would have helped the pacing of these books. I get that this is personal preference, but it still bugged me. All in all, a very impressive book, but to get to a five star I either have to have a bit more from the characters or a more organic structure.