You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

4.33 AVERAGE

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
adventurous emotional medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes

There were multiple moments I was actually so stressed. The attention to details Sanderson adds is so well done. Idk how he does it!
adventurous dark emotional sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
adventurous dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Another Brandon Sanderson classic. He never disappoints. Starting book 3 now!
adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The first half is honestly a drag, and I think the Elend/Vin relationship issues were annoyingly drawn out. That said, the end of the book is so good. Brought it up to a 4 for me! 

The last 20% of the book was so good, but the first 80% was slow. Only 3 stars because it’s too slow to want to re-read it 

Things I liked:
  1. Examining belief and religious structures - Sazed has some really thought provoking musings 
  2. A flawed but powerful FMC 
  3. The magic system is so flawlessly is implemented 
  4. Thinking about being a Kandra 
  5. Tindywll - alone with with Sazed 

Things I don’t like:
  1. The political intrigues are entertaining, but only up to a point 
  2. Breeze’s relationship with the young girl 
  3. The pacing was just too slow at first 

Content warnings for mental illness including hearing voices, war, mass murder, betrayal, involuntary addiction, some body horror, and mentions of forced breeding/eugenics.

It felt like 10-20% of this book was listening to characters work through every detail of their internal monologue. One of Sanderson's greatest strengths in later books is his ability to create a cast of characters with diverse and internally consistent perspectives, but this book tells us those perspectives too much instead of showing them.

Self-doubt is also a strong theme in this book, but the genre and number of different perspectives severely undercut it. It's hard to take a character doubting if someone still loves them seriously when the next chapter is from the perspective of their lover being totally in love. That's not to say there were no twists. There were some awesome twists I didn't see coming, but others could have been more interesting or more impactful if the number of perspectives had been changed or we went longer between viewpoints.

Sanderson is a great author today, and this book has a lot of potential. I'm much more excited for the next book based off the ending to this one.