A review by louisallama
The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

adventurous slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

While I did enjoy this book, and I feel like the ending elevated it from three stars to three and a half stars, I think that it really would have benefited from losing about a hundred pages. 640 pages was just too long and while there was stuff happening the whole time, the book still felt slow paced. Not a specific hundred pages, I just don't think that we needed to see everything in such detail.
I did enjoy the ending, I thought it was a rather satisfying conclusion. I'm not sure Brandon Sanderson is the author for me though, because I personally find his writing very 'telling rather than showing' and while I don't always need a lot of flowery descriptions and deep character introspection, again, 640 pages is a lot to just be told what is happening. If you like books where you just turn your brain off and have the story happen at you, then you'll like this book.
And while I definitely didn't predict all of the plot twists, the one about
the Lord Ruler not being the one who wrote the logbook
was kind of obvious by the time it was revealed.
Also the extreme amount of parallels between
this book and Brandon Sanderson's own Steelheart
just made me kind of mad.
At the end it felt like I'd just read the same book in a different font.
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