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 into the cosmology and basically pretend all the genre-exploring of the first 1.98 books dealt with? No, we’re going to make this a new set of Mistborn books almost pretending like they’re still happening?
Got it.
Luckily for all of us this more or less works. If you’ve made it this far with Sanderson, he’s not letting you down in this book. In fact, it feels way more Brandson Sanderson than the first two of this series. For example, the triumphant return of his favorite word “maladroit.”
Also, his interstitial materials are among the best. Not as good a 700 pages deep into Radiance of Light kind of apocrypha, but still very good.
Even though he’s married and maybe has kids, he still writes as if he doesn’t know what sex is or believes it’s a real thing that people have…..it’s like purely detailed as if someone heard about sex and wrote about that. And Survivor-bless him, he tries so so so hard to be funny and just can’t be.
But that’s part of his charm.
