Sign in with Facebook***Dave Hill's Reviews > Mistborn: The Final Empire
Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1)
by Brandon Sanderson (Goodreads Author)
by Brandon Sanderson (Goodreads Author)
This book was recommended to me (thanks, Lee!) as a magical "caper" book, and there's some truth to that, as a crew of thieves plans the biggest heist of all -- one that will bring down the Big Evil Baddy and his empire. And, inevitably, complications (and mixed motivations among the crew) make things still more difficult.
I had a hell of a time getting into this book. While the mythology is fascinating (what's the centuries-later aftermath when the Quest to Save the World significantly fails ... think of Frodo keeping the One Ring) and the magic systems are imaginative ("burning" ingested metals to trigger significant but limited supernatural powers) the setting is simultaneously dreary and shallow.
On the dreary side, everything is gloom, doom, and misery, from the smoky skies and frequent volcanic ashfall to the stunted, brown growth of plants, to the serfdom/slavery of most people, the callousness of the nobility, and the evil-evil-EVIL of the Big Evil Baddy and his operatives. Enter our protagonist, a young girl with significant magic potential but a traumatic background that makes her mistrust everyone.
Beyond the glass-half-full-or-empty despair, and the interesting history and magic system, and the caper idea itself, the world setting is desperately shallow. Slaves! Plantations! Unfeeling nobles! Evil bad guys! In a sense the caper and its participants serve to distract from how two-dimensional a fantasy realm the Final Empire is.
Still, they are a good distraction, and once -- about 3/4 of the way through the book -- things start hopping, the book gripped me pretty well (well enough to miss my stop on the train). I (intentionally) wasn't sure if there would be a sequel, so the final chapter or two were quite the roller coaster in terms of it being unclear whether things would wrap up quickly or not at all (the answer: both). Thus, the ending was ... better than expected earlier on.
Even so, after the grind of the first part of the book, I'm of mixed mind whether I want to get the next volume. We'll see.
I had a hell of a time getting into this book. While the mythology is fascinating (what's the centuries-later aftermath when the Quest to Save the World significantly fails ... think of Frodo keeping the One Ring) and the magic systems are imaginative ("burning" ingested metals to trigger significant but limited supernatural powers) the setting is simultaneously dreary and shallow.
On the dreary side, everything is gloom, doom, and misery, from the smoky skies and frequent volcanic ashfall to the stunted, brown growth of plants, to the serfdom/slavery of most people, the callousness of the nobility, and the evil-evil-EVIL of the Big Evil Baddy and his operatives. Enter our protagonist, a young girl with significant magic potential but a traumatic background that makes her mistrust everyone.
Beyond the glass-half-full-or-empty despair, and the interesting history and magic system, and the caper idea itself, the world setting is desperately shallow. Slaves! Plantations! Unfeeling nobles! Evil bad guys! In a sense the caper and its participants serve to distract from how two-dimensional a fantasy realm the Final Empire is.
Still, they are a good distraction, and once -- about 3/4 of the way through the book -- things start hopping, the book gripped me pretty well (well enough to miss my stop on the train). I (intentionally) wasn't sure if there would be a sequel, so the final chapter or two were quite the roller coaster in terms of it being unclear whether things would wrap up quickly or not at all (the answer: both). Thus, the ending was ... better than expected earlier on.
Even so, after the grind of the first part of the book, I'm of mixed mind whether I want to get the next volume. We'll see.
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