Finished the mistborn trilogy. SPOILERS FOLLOW Im having a little trouble deciding how I feel about it. I still think it got off to a great start in the first book, but I was disappointed with the second and third. Its hard to describe why, exactly. I sort of feel like he was trying to write an epic and just didnt know how to do it. I think the first book was best because it *wasnt* epic in scope. It was an adventure story. All of it took place essentially in one city, and Sanderson seemed to know what he was doing with this caper-turned-revolution storyline. But after that he sort of floundered. The siege setting of the second book just made it feel claustrophobic, even though it took place in the same city as the first book. And the way that he described how society was rebuilding itself after the collapse just seemed forced (especially his explanation of how Elend came to power). The third book went even further down that path where everything felt convenient and contrived. He did a fantastic job of explaining everything. Everything made sense by the end. But at the same time, I felt like more and more of the book was just that: explanation. Sure there were fight scenes and the plot moved forward and so forth, and maybe it was the excerpts at the beginnings of the chapters, but I just couldnt shake this feeling that nothing was at stake because we were just seeing what happened on the road to this inevitable end. Which, by the way, was the real disappointment. Unless youre Shakespeare, you better leave someone the reader cares about alive on stage at the end or your audience is, at best, going to stare at the last page agog asking WTF? and, at worst, going to be furious and throw the book across the room.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 22:37:05 +0000
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