Of process and prophecy

[bloodygranuaile]

While maybe technically not Gothic enough to constitute “spooky reason reading” proper, I nonetheless checked out the sequel to Mistborn: The Final Empire, Brandon Sanderson’s The Well of Ascension, from the library. This turned out to be pretty good “hanging out on the couch recovering from a cold” reading once the cold recovery moved into book-reading territory (the first few days I couldn’t really manage more than video). This is in part because it was 600 pages long so it kept me occupied, but also it was pretty good! It started off a bit slow, and partly this may have been because I wasn’t feeling 100% (usually I’m fine with slow) but also it is genuinely quite a lot of what is clearly setup - classic “middle book syndrome” but still a pretty solid middle book. What it has been setting up towards has thus far had good payoff, very twisty and slippery - the last 150 or 200 pages were riveting once I had put in all the work to get that far and get invested. Vin once again picks up the conversational idiot ball when confronted with Straff Venture’s progeny and spends far too much time saying anything at all to Zane other than “Why are you here, you weirdo?” and I was relieved that he died when he did because he was frankly an insufferable edgelord. Elend on the other hand is fleshed out more and becomes less annoying than he was in the last book, running face-first into the hell that is actual, non-theoretical self-governance as part of an August Deliberative Body and handling the frustrations thereof with some measure of integrity and dignity, as well as admirable restraint from grandstanding. Overall I feel like the politics of this book are a little iffy in a very traditional fantasy direction but Sanderson certainly has “everything that sucks about working in committee” down, except for “having to learn Robert’s Rules.”

Possibly my favorite plot threads were the ones involving Sazed, the religious scholar, and Tindwyl, the bitchy biography expert, both of the secret order of forbidden thing-knowing from Terris. They are in a “the Power of Friendship and Document Review” story and in an unusual twist for that genre it is the “Document Review” part of that where betrayal awaits. So that was really fascinating to me as someone who both enjoys Power of Friendship and Document Review stories and also has some criticisms about the degree to which many writers’ belief that the answer to everything is either finding or committing writing seeps into their stories.

Vin keeps leveling up to terrifying degrees and also manages a little character growth as well. She is a solid protagonist but I still found myself more interested in the secondary characters this time around; she is a very comfortable and enjoyable character type for me so while I enjoyed reading her perfectly fine I still felt like her internal struggles, while not badly done, were still nothing I haven’t seen from like at least three Tamora Pierce heroines and three hundred knockoff Tamora Pierce heroines. I trust she will manage to save the world without accidentally unleashing Something Even Worse by the end of the series; that’s how these things go. Hope she gets to retire peacefully and doesn’t have to die tragically in order to make that happen, but we’ll see.

Overall, solid fantasy doorstopper, will keep reading.