Mistborn – Brandon Sanderson

Tor, Copyright 2006, 657pages

Editor: Moshe Feder

ISBN: 978-0-7653-6096-0

Read: March 2011 (at age 32)

First time read

If you haven’t read it:

This is sort of a heist novel – along the lines of Ocean’s Eleven, but in a fantasy world, with a neat magic system.

From the back cover:

Once, a hero arose to save the world.  A young man with a mysterious heritage courageously challenged the darkness that strangled the land.

He failed.

For a thousand years since, the world has been a wasteland of ash and mist ruled by the immortal emperor known as the Lord Ruler.  Every revolt has failed miserably.

Yet somehow, hope survives.  Hope that dares to dream of ending the empire and even the Lord Ruler himself.  A new kind of uprising is being planned, one built around the ultimate caper, one that depends on the cunning of a brilliant criminal mastermind and the determination of an unlikely heroine, a street urchin who must learn to master Allomancy, the power of a Mistborn.

Reactions (and spoilers, of course) below the break:

Overall:

I wanted to like this book.  I really did.  But I hated the beginning. 

I didn’t like the characters.  Eventually, I started to like the book, I guess, but…

For the good, I really enjoyed the setting and the magic system.  The imagery, especially late in the book, was spectacular. 

For the bad, the characters spoke in ways that furthered the plot to a fault, in that it was transparent that the author had sat down and said “what does this scene need to do?” and then structured the dialogue to show the appropriate character traits, plot advancement, and world-building elements.  Really, this is a good way to design a scene, I think, but it isn’t good if the character traits, plot advancement, and world-building elements are more important than what it would be reasonable for the character to say in the setting.

The book got much stronger as it went on – my least favorite part of the book was Part 1, in which we meet our heroes, the magical system and the characters in the book are explored, and the main heroine gets her origin story. 

Typically, this is my favorite part of a hero’s journey-style book.  It’s where we get to see an ordinary person subjected to extraordinary circumstances, and where they get the glimmering that they just might be able to survive or even overcome this.  In this book, it felt rushed.  We meet the main character.  She’s a young, beaten-down thief, who’s survived on luck, a bit of latent magic, and cunning.  And then all of a sudden she’s this mage who can fly, be a gun, deflect bullets, influence emotions, etc., etc., just because she’s told how.  It all came so easily that I couldn’t buy it.

I also didn’t buy the characters, (other than Vin, the main one).  I don’t know what they didn’t have, but they didn’t have something that made me believe that the characters were the crack thieves that they were presented as.  One was supposed to be a master manipulator.  He seemed clumsy at it, and transparent.  One was the dashing leader, whose well-thought out plans included “well let’s brainstorm a bit” complete with one-word tasks on a chalkboard.  It just didn’t work.  I didn’t buy in. 

The setting had a lot of strong points – atmosphere, the cool magic system, a failed hero cum despotic ruler for a bad guy.  It was really very neat.  Science wasn’t a strong point, though.  The brown/red/yellow plants – I just don’t see how it would work.  At some point, chlorophyll has to count for something.  Ash falling all the time is bad for fields – it’s eventually good fertilizer, but it takes a while.

Things got a lot better as the book went on.  Once I could just ignore the first section, and didn’t have to be introduced to the characters and see them grow into their powers, and just see them as the author envisaged – competent, but flawed – then things worked a lot better.

I did like the main character, Vin, throughout the book.  She seemed relatively well thought-out.  We see through her viewpoint a lot, so I could judge her character by her thoughts, which, if overly plot/setting/character trait-centric, I could buy.  They were private thoughts, so they don’t have the same requirement for natural-seeming that spoken words or actions do.

Rating:  3 

The initial section was enough to keep me up at night, wondering why I was disliking it so much.  Ignoring that, then the book would have been a solid 4.

This “overall” section is a bit long and ranty, so I’ll just breeze through the different categories:

Characters: 

Weak early, but better in the later sections of the book.  Dialogue was a weak point throughout, as it often seemed to serve other interests than what the character would reasonably say in the circumstances.  This got better toward the end of the book, but never went away.

Plot: 

Very good storyline with nicely inevitable twists.  It felt very rushed through the early part of the book.  It was like the author just wanted to “get to the good stuff” in the middle and at the end, instead of putting good stuff at the beginning, too.

Premise: 

A heist novel that turns into something more.  It’s good.

Setting: 

The best part of the book, in my opinion.  The villain and the magic are brilliant, and the world felt like a big place with all kinds of diversity.

Readability: 

Excellent.  The writing flowed nicely, and I certainly got stuck in the book toward the end.

Other Opinions:

Fantasy Book News

Positive review.

Critical Hits.com

Another positive one.

The rest I found followed similar lines.  Am I the only one who had trouble with the beginning?  Let me know if I'm out to lunch or if there's something to it.