I swear, one of these days Brandon Sanderson will write something that I dislike—something that is boring or trite or that just plain doesn’t work—but that day is not this day. This day that son of a gun has written yet another clever, entertaining story for me to four or five star. And this time he takes on detective stories! With a fantasy twist, of course. In the near future, some sort of supernatural event has reshaped the world, and made it possible to recreate […]
He couldn’t help himself
Brandon Sanderson, man, it’s like he tried with this series to just see what would happen if you tried to answer some of the genre-bending questions leftover from Mistborn. So, like, ok, what would the world be like a few hundred years later? Oh, a mix of the Wild West and Victorian England? Well, that’s pretty cool. Bullets and allomancy is a cool combination….kind of in now, that’s neat. Cockney chicanery and US Marshall tropes….cool cool. How about three books in, we jump right back […]
This is a really long book, you guys
We primarily follow the story of three people in this book, with occasional points of view from others to further shed light on goings on. The first (and in my opinion, most interesting) of our protagonists is Kaladin Stormblessed, a surgeon’s son, turned army spearman turned slave. After numerous escape attempts, he ends up at the long-running war on the Shattered Plains, a desolate landscape made up of numerous rocky plateaus, requiring the fighting armies to have bridges to get across the chasms. Kaladin becomes […]
Probably Don’t Start with book 5 in this series
Who am I kidding? If you read the first four Mistborn novels, you’re likely going to read this one. If you didn’t, well, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not that Brandon Sanderson novels are without teeth, but he’s almost goofily squeamish about sex and sexuality. They tend to have some interesting ideas about religion and faith, have good action, a reliably interesting and intricate magic/abilities systems, and he’s good at embedding genre fiction into his genre fiction. His political writing is […]