![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I’ve been bad at carving out time to really sit down and read these past few weeks but I did finally finish The Hero of Ages, the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series.
This continues the trend from the other two books where a whole bunch of mysterious stuff that was set up previously pulls together in a series of very large reveals right near the end, making a story that’s 80% slow(ish) paced action-mystery (despite the numerous fight scenes) followed by 20% high-octane roller-coaster ride.
SPOILER: I also appreciated that Sanderson was ballsy enough to stick the landing after building up his Big Bad so much. It’s always a letdown when someone builds up their crushingly powerful villain to be so all-powerful that it seems like only God Himself could stop him and then our intrepid hero manages to take him down with like the power of friendship or loving his mama or solving a riddle or something. Sanderson is willing to not only have his main character become a god but to follow that up with another character actually becoming monotheistic God Himself in order to do all that needs to be done before the series can wrap up satisfyingly and end, leaving us only one bite-sized little mystery about Allomancy to tease a sequel series.
Anyway, we’ve got puzzles and battles and intrigues galore, and a body count that’s starting to look like about 90% of the Final Empire’s populace, and we learn all kinds of fucked up things about the various magic systems–there’s a whole-ass secret other one that we hadn’t learned about in the first two books, in addition to the secretly-still-around one and the “main,” openly acknowledged one that has a lot of misinformation around it.
Sanderson can certainly write a battle scene and now that Elend is a Mistborn we get even more of them. The destruction mounts and mounts as our characters level up to absurd lengths that always seem like they ought to break the game except that it’s not a game and also Ruin seems to always be one step ahead of them still. The various “hard” magic systems are understandable and precise enough that I did find myself getting sucked into being wowed and horrified by the general mad-science-ness of the reveals about them, which is impressive because I as a reader am prone to not even really trying to figure out or remember what’s going on with that sort of thing and putting it all into the “yeah yeah, bounce the graviton particle beam” category (I am not a gamer and I can see why lots of gamers like Sanderson, for all the reasons that I am not a gamer). The additional romantic plotlines seemed about as pasted on as the first one but did not take up too much page space or do anything too idiotically disruptive, but were milquetoast enough to make the blurb on the front cover from noted homophobe and religious zealot Orson Scott Card about “understanding… how love takes root in the human heart” extremely funny. Apparently love takes root in the human heart when a lady says one moderately observant thing to a man, and that’s basically it.
I am going to try to knock out some other reading before embarking upon the Wax and Wayne post-trilogy quartet. I am not entertaining the notion of picking up any other series until at least next year, at which point I am sure I will be entertaining that notion very hard.
This continues the trend from the other two books where a whole bunch of mysterious stuff that was set up previously pulls together in a series of very large reveals right near the end, making a story that’s 80% slow(ish) paced action-mystery (despite the numerous fight scenes) followed by 20% high-octane roller-coaster ride.
SPOILER: I also appreciated that Sanderson was ballsy enough to stick the landing after building up his Big Bad so much. It’s always a letdown when someone builds up their crushingly powerful villain to be so all-powerful that it seems like only God Himself could stop him and then our intrepid hero manages to take him down with like the power of friendship or loving his mama or solving a riddle or something. Sanderson is willing to not only have his main character become a god but to follow that up with another character actually becoming monotheistic God Himself in order to do all that needs to be done before the series can wrap up satisfyingly and end, leaving us only one bite-sized little mystery about Allomancy to tease a sequel series.
Anyway, we’ve got puzzles and battles and intrigues galore, and a body count that’s starting to look like about 90% of the Final Empire’s populace, and we learn all kinds of fucked up things about the various magic systems–there’s a whole-ass secret other one that we hadn’t learned about in the first two books, in addition to the secretly-still-around one and the “main,” openly acknowledged one that has a lot of misinformation around it.
Sanderson can certainly write a battle scene and now that Elend is a Mistborn we get even more of them. The destruction mounts and mounts as our characters level up to absurd lengths that always seem like they ought to break the game except that it’s not a game and also Ruin seems to always be one step ahead of them still. The various “hard” magic systems are understandable and precise enough that I did find myself getting sucked into being wowed and horrified by the general mad-science-ness of the reveals about them, which is impressive because I as a reader am prone to not even really trying to figure out or remember what’s going on with that sort of thing and putting it all into the “yeah yeah, bounce the graviton particle beam” category (I am not a gamer and I can see why lots of gamers like Sanderson, for all the reasons that I am not a gamer). The additional romantic plotlines seemed about as pasted on as the first one but did not take up too much page space or do anything too idiotically disruptive, but were milquetoast enough to make the blurb on the front cover from noted homophobe and religious zealot Orson Scott Card about “understanding… how love takes root in the human heart” extremely funny. Apparently love takes root in the human heart when a lady says one moderately observant thing to a man, and that’s basically it.
I am going to try to knock out some other reading before embarking upon the Wax and Wayne post-trilogy quartet. I am not entertaining the notion of picking up any other series until at least next year, at which point I am sure I will be entertaining that notion very hard.