Pixie Dust's Reviews > Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set

I came to read this book by way of Patrick Rothfuss – one of my favourite fantasy writers. I had just finished reading Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle Books 1 and 2, and while in terrible throes of agony waiting for Book 3 to come out, turned to reading Rothfuss’s blog for comfort. He highly recommended the Mistborn Trilogy, so here I am.

I must admit I was terribly unfair to Sanderson when I started reading Mistborn. I kept comparing him to Rothfuss, and was disappointed when Sanderson’s style was totally different. While the magic system in the Kingkiller Chronicle was so natural as to be totally believable, that of the Mistborn books seemed more like a clever contrivance. The way how there were a finite number of metals with magic (or Allomanic powers), and each metal had its corresponding alloy with a related but opposing power, seemed too neat. In fact, I felt that Sanderson seemed so proud of his magic system that every description of the magic seemed to be him saying, “Look how clever I am!” I was also initially irritated by the use of capital letters for Push and Pull – the terms for leveraging on the metals’ powers. Perhaps this was just me trying to take vicarious revenge on my undergraduate professor from years ago for marking my essay down for my “irritating use of capitals for the word ‘Other’”. (Hey, Prof, half the readings I did used Caps too!)

But perhaps about thirty pages into the book, I was hooked. Sanderson is an amazing craftsman. Any aspiring writer would benefit from listening to Sanderson’s podcast Writing Excuses at www.writingexcuses.com/ which he co-hosts with a couple of other writer friends. I came upon his podcast after reading Mistborn, and I must say he certainly practises what he preaches. For example, he doesn’t describe how Kelsier wipes out an entire plantation’s nobility at the opening of the story because he does not want to info-dump right at the beginning of the book. So he takes care to first build up enough momentum and reader interest with setting and character before embarking on an exposition on how the magic works.

Book 1 (The Final Empire) was still fairly tightly strung together, but in Book 2 (The Well of Ascension), we start to see the different threads of the story venturing out on their seemingly disparate ways. But these subplots are opportunities for creating twists in the story, and Sanderson certainly uses them in unexpected but convincing ways. And how all these threads converge and are tied together by the end of Book 3 (The Hero of Ages) is nothing if not exemplary of extremely well-thought through plotting.

(view spoiler)[ There were times in Book 3 when I simply could not see how the heroes would triumph, as for every step forward, they seemed to be set back another three steps, so dire was their situation. But the step by step revelations of how the enemy can be defeated are the incremental rewards doled out to the long-suffering readers who are breathlessly awaiting the finale on their heroes’ behalf. And as for Vin’s earring – I knew there must be something to it, right from the beginning of Book 1, but I never expected that it would be linked to Feruchemy, in such a crucial way!
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