I’m taking a break from my Diana Wynne Jones challenge to read different fantasy.
Thanks to my wonderful Book Exchange partner, I was gifted the full Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson and have been chomping at the bit to dig into it. I lost a lot of sleep over this book, it was just too good to only read for a half hour before bed, and as dense and heavy as Sanderson often is, this book blew by.
Mistborn introduces us to the Final Empire, a pseudo post-apocalyptic world where plants don’t grow, the sun is always red, and the world is dominated by both nightly mists and a mysterious immortal overlord who’s enslaved ninety percent of the country’s population. The skaa are beaten down with no end in sight while the small band of nobility pretend to live a life of luxury under the debilitating hold of the Lord Ruler. The world is dark, desolate, hopeless and violent. But one man, Kelsier, a survivor of the Lord Ruler’s worst punishment, has a plan to topple the status quo and free the skaa from their thousand-year enslavement.
One of the things I most admire about Sanderson’s fantasy is his ability to show his stories from multiple points of view and making each character’s voice unique and specific. Kelsier vs. Vin vs. Elend sound completely different, and their opinions and observations about the world bring multiple interpretations that build the plot in a particularly “Sanderson” way. While the prose is dense, because we’re getting everything about this world from character observations, the highlights or lowlights of the story resonate more deeply and are imbued with meaning.
Reading this book off the tail end of the Stormlight Archives has been an interesting feeling; both because Mistborn was published 4 years before The Way of Kings, and I feel like I’m reading Sanderson backwards, and also because I can see how Mistborn was almost the practice run for what Sanderson masters in Stormlight. Kelsier almost felt like the blueprint for Dalinar, and Vin the blue print for Kaladin/Shallan. While they’re complete and full characters on their own in Mistborn, the ways Sanderson builds on his skill of creating characters and how they move through their spaces was wonderfully beautiful to see.
5 stars, and I can’t wait to read the next 2 installments.
