Tag: book reviews

Leviathan Wakes Review

Cover of the book Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. CoreyLast year, when I was working at NIST, one of my roommates was reading the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. He recommended it to me as some of the best science fiction he’s ever read, so I got myself onto the waiting list at the library for the first book. Yes I know that there’s an Amazon show, and one day when I’m not in law school I will watch it, but I’ve always been a book first kind of girl.  In late 2018, I finally got the first book of the series, Leviathan Wakes, out were the library and read it. I read the second book in January, and I’m waiting on the third. Since I’m continuing this series, I wanted to write full reviews for the first two books. This week, I’ll talk about Leviathan Wakes, and I’ll talk about the second book, Caliban’s War, next week.

Leviathan Wakes is set in the far future, where interplanetary space travel is common, and it follows two main characters. Jim Holden is the XO on a big ship that hauls ice from Saturn’s rings back to the asteroid belt and the inner planets. When the ship receives a distress call, Holden takes a small crew and a small ship and goes to help. They find a derelict ship full of dead bodies. And while Holden and his crew are investigating, someone nukes the whole ice hauler. So Holden and his team, the only survivors of the original ice hauler crew, set out to figure out who destroyed their ship and what it has to do with the derelict they were investigating. Meanwhile, Detective Miller is hired by a rich family to find their missing daughter, who ran away to join the revolutionaries in the asteroid belt. Miller’s investigation leads him to the derelict ship Holden and his crew discovered. And so now they’re investigating together. But as they draw closer to the truth, things become more and more dangerous. They’re moving in on a secret that could destroy the solar system and that someone is willing to kill for. At the same time, we have a war brewing between Earth and Mars, and the asteroid belt is preparing to fight for its independence, and all of this is connected.

I liked this book. In general, I really like anything to do with space, so right off the bat I’m in a good place. I did have some problems with it though. Let’s start with what I liked.

For me, the world building in this book was by far its strongest point. It was very detailed and intricate, and all the pieces that we learned about this futuristic solar system became relevant later. I don’t know if the science is accurate, but it’s portrayed with such authority that I believe it, whether it’s accurate science or not.

The plot was pretty strong too. Once I got into the book, there was no putting it down, and the plot and the setting work so well together.

I was less enthusiastic about the characters in this book. I felt like their motivations either weren’t fully explored or weren’t fully articulated to the reader. At least from my perspective, we pretty quickly  pass the point where Holden’s quest for revenge against the people who blew up his ship and Miller’s quest to find the missing girl are the only motivating factors. Too much else is going on. Over and over again, Holden and Miller would make these decisions that just didn’t make any sense to me. Like if there’s some sort of nuclear event on the asteroid and everyone’s being ordered into shelters, but you’re pretty sure that something else is going on, YOU DO NOT GO OPEN A SHELTER TO SEE WHAT’S GOING ON! You get out of there!

Along the same lines, I felt like the characters didn’t develop over the course of the story. They keep making these same types of bad choices for bad reasons, and they just don’t learn from them.

Finally, and this is entirely a personal preference, this book managed to hit all my sci fi squik buttons, from people being thrown out of airlocks to nuclear meltdowns. Things are generally pretty grim. So if you’re looking for a light fluffy space adventure, this is not it.

Overall, as I said,I really liked the plot and the world building of this book, and while the characters got under my skin a little bit, it wasn’t enough to ruin my enjoyment in the book. It struck me as a very foundational book, and it’s the sort of book that I don’t feel like I can form a good opinion about without reading the rest of the series. If the rest of the series is excellent, I will forgive Leviathan Wakes its flaws. If the rest of the series continues to have these same flaws, we’l, then I won’t forgive Leviathan Wakes. I did go on to read the second book in the series, and as I said, I’ll talk about that more next week. But spoiler alert, I liked it a lot more than this one.

In the meantime, have you read Leviathan Wakes? What did you think?

The Way of Kings Review

Cover of The Way of Kings by Brandon SandersonHello all. I’m back with a full review of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I read this book last month, I really enjoyed it, and I’m excited to talk about it with you.

The Way of Kings is epic fantasy of the most epic kind. I’ve never read anything quite so expansive. The closest thing I’ve ever read in scope is Lord of the Rings, and even that focused on the same group of characters. This book is a thousand pages long. I listened to the audiobook, which was forty-five and ahalf hours. So this was also the longest book I’ve ever read (or the longest I can remember reading).

The book is set in a world that is regularly ravaged by deadly storms called high storms. Because of the storms, all plant life, down to grass, has the ability to retreat into rock shells. There are also giant crab things that the humans use to pull wagons and such, and all structures are built to withstand the high storms, because if you’re caught outside in a high storm, you’re dead. Despite their danger, the magic of the world also comes from the high storms. Gemstones left out during a storm will become infused with stormlight. These gemstones are used as currency or as light in the richer houses. Gemstones can also be used to transform one form of matter into another, like stone into smoke. And the backstory of the book is that the world is recovering from the desolations, where monsters called voidbringers attacked humanity and were fought off by the heralds and the knights radiant. The almighty, the heralds, and the knights radiant now form the backbone of the major religion of the book. The knights radiant used magical swords and armor, called shardblades and shardplate, which they left behind when they vanished. Because the knights radiant had a glowing aura and glowing eyes, class in this world is based on eye color. Those with light eyes make up the royalty and nobility, while those with dark eyes form the working class. Finally, there are magical creatures called spren that appear around humans a lot, such as pain spren, creation spren, glory spren, and so on. They’re generally just colored lights, but we do get one sentient wind spren and she is awesome.

The book begins with the assassination of the king of one of the most powerful nations in the world, Alethkar. The Parshendi nation take credit for the assassination, so the Alethi wage war on the Parshendi to avenge their fallen king. The book follows four main storylines, with several other smaller vignets scattered throughout.

First, and my personal favorite, we have Kaladin. Kaladin is a darkeyes soldier who was enslaved and sold to the army of one of the eigh princsome of Alethkar. He winds up as part of a bridge crew in High Prince Sadeas’s army on the shattered plains—a bunch of plateaus divided by deep chasms. Its the bridge crews’ job to carry the bridges for the army to cross the chasms to get to battles with the Parshendi, but Kaladin quickly learns it is also the bridge crews’ job to serve as bait and draw the Parshendi fire away from the army. Determined not to die and not to let any of his crew die, Kaladin becomes the leader of his crew and fights first to win their trust and respect and then to train them to survive. He is accompanied by Syl, an extraordinarily sentient wind spren. When their tactics start to work, and the Parshendi start shooting at the soldiers on the approach instead of the bridge crews, Kaladin is given a severe punishment he is not meant to survive. But he does survive, and he realizes he might have some power of his own, and there’s more to his relationship with the spren Syl than he first thought. So he turns that power to planning his bridge crew’s escape from the war camp.

Next, we have Lady Shallan Davar, a young lighteyes noblewoman whose family is in danger after her father’s death. Shallan hatches a daring plan to become apprenticed to the king’s sister, gain her trust, and then steal her soulcaster, the glove encrusted with gemstones that allows the princess to transform one thing into another. But Shallan is soon sucked into the princess’s studies of the origins of the voidbringers and their connection to the old king’s assassination. And soon (relatively speaking), she realizes that she and the princess are hiding the same secret.

Next, we have High Prince Dalinar, uncle to the current king and brother of the old king who was assassinated. Before he was assassinated, the old king pointed Dalinar to a book called The Way of Kings and told him to follow the codes in the book, which lay out strict protocol for war time. The old king also wanted Dalinar to unite the often fractious high princes of Alethkar. While following the codes and striving to form alliances among the high princes, Dalinar also begins having visions of the desolations of the past and the knights radiant during the high storms. He falls under a lot of scrutiny and his own sons begin questioning his sanity, until Dalinar is left trying to choose between following his own instincts or admitting that he is going mad and abdicating his position.

Finally, and perhaps I should have started with this character, we have Szeth-son-son-Vallano, also known as the assassin in white. You guessed it: he killed the old king of Alethkar. Szeth is truthless, which means (I think) that he must obey anyone who carries his oath stone. Like he’s magically forced to. He also carries a shardblade and has the ability to bind objects to each other for short periods of time, which allows him to do some cool things like reverse gravity and run along the ceiling, and otherwise makes him a really good assassin. As the book progresses, Szeth is drawn into a conspiracy that involves a lot of death, and he carries it out, weeping as he kills noble after noble.

Like I said, this was a really long, complex book, and I am only just beginning to scratch the surface with this description. I do hope this gives you enough to decide if this sounds like something you’d be interested in reading. To help with that decision, let’s dive into what I thought of the book.

I think my favorite part of this book was the characters and the world. The characters were all so different, and the world was so alien but so vivid and intricate, and I really loved all that. It was just so easy to get immersed in this story.

On the other hand, it was long. I won’t say it was a slog, but it was a slow, deliberate march. There was a fair amount of exposition, and the plot was sprawling, as you can see from above. There ar some connections that I didn’t make until I looked up the wikipedia summary to get the spellings of characters’ names right (hint: keep an eye on Wit). As much as I liked the book, I had a hard time getting through it because it was so long and so sprawling. I remember being about six hours from the ending and positive that there was no way all of this was going to come together.

But yes, it did come together, and it was pretty spectacular. It was one of those great moments where I actually let out a horrified “Aha! Oh god!” in the middle of the kitchen.

I do wish, after all that, that the ending had been more of a conclusion. I understand that the book is the first in a series, and I also understand that I have been conditioned by a lot of other books to expect the first book in a series to be a complete story that you can continue if you wish. I’m okay with first books not standing on their own. I really am. But this book was just so long that the fact that it wasn’t a complete story bugged me.

On the other hand, oh my god that ending!

One last thing that drove me nuts was that there were two narrators for the audiobook, and they pronounced a couple characters’ names differently. Like come on, people. Communicate on this stuff.

My overall thoughts are that I really, really liked this book. I don’t think I loved it as much as the first Mistborn book,but it was still really good. I’m not convinced it needed to be as long as it was, and while I liked the ending, I wish it had wrapped up more. I loved the world and the characters, and the ending had me dying for the next book. I’m on the waiting list to get the sequel from the library right now, and I’m hoping to get it soon. I have a feeling it is going to be awesome!

In the meantime, have you read The Way of Kings? What did you think?

The Bane Chronicles Review

Cover for The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Maureen JohnsonLast week, I finished The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, and maureen Johnson. This is a collection of short stories about events in the life of Magnus Bane, one of the major characters in Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments, Infernal Devices, and Dark Artifices series (possibly others but these are all I’ve read). I did my best in this post to talk about this book without spoilers, but it was difficult given how closely tied to Clare’s other work this is.

I really liked this book. It’s a lot of fun, but at the same time, it’s not entirely fluffy adventures. There is definitely some dark stuff in these books. What I particularly like is the ability to see several big events in history (centuries apart) from the same point of view character. Over the course of these stories, we see Magnus’s adventures in Peru (which may or may not have led him to be banned from Peru), his attempt to save Marie Antoinette and the royal family during the French Revolution, his stint running a speakeasy in the late 1920s, his discovery of a ring of vampires getting high on humans addicted to drugs in the 1980s, and more. I liked how cohesive this book was, and I had fun putting together what I learned about Magnus in each story.

There was, as I’ve mentioned, some overlap with the existing books in Clare’s shadowhunter universe. In one story, we meet Will Herondale’s father, Edmund, and in another story Magnus encounters James Herondale, Will and Tessa’s son. Later on, we see Magnus’s first interaction with Valentine’s Circle, the story of how he first meets Jocelyn and Clary from Magnus’s point of view, his first date with Alec, and another story about Magnus trying to figure out what to get Alec for his birthday. The final story is all the messages on Magnus’s voicemail after what happened at the end of City of Fallen Angels. While all these stories were interesting, I thought they were on the whole weaker than the stories that were just about Magnus and his adventures, with the exception of the first date with Alec because that is a great story. These stories were burdened by the fact that they were connected so heavily to the plot of the other books. For them to be complete short stories, there had to be a fair amount of exposition that wasn’t necessary in the other stories. At the same time, as I worked my way through these stories, I was definitely looking forward to seeing Magnus’s perspective on the crucial events in the main books of the series. I think I would have been disappointed if there was no overlap at all. And I definitely did enjoy these stories. So while these stories weren’t as strong on their own in my opinion, connected to the broader universe they are great.

If you haven’t read any of Cassandra Clare’s books before, I’m not sure I would recommend this as a starting point. I don’t think it would make a lot of sense. But if you’ve read any of her books, this collection is great fun and I definitely recommend.

Jameyanne Rereads Harry Potter, 2019 edition: Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets

Every year I reread the Harry Potter books. I’m a nerd like that. And every year, I discover something new.

Recently, a friend suggested that I write down my thoughts during my yearly reread and do a blog post about them. She may have been joking, but I’m running with it.

This year, I reread the Harry Potter books starting just after finals in December 2018 and through April 2019 (I’m actually not finished with my reread yet but I’m planning to finish this month). I took my time with this reread, savoring the books instead of hurtling through them at my usual breakneck reading speed. This was a particularly fun reread, because at the same time I was reading the first two books, I was also reading The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, which really made me focus on the food in the series. Also, in my middle grade space adventure novel, my main characters are listening to the audiobooks when they’re having downtime in the plot—the Jim Dale version, of course. This may be cut from the final draft, but right now I’m having a lot of fun interpreting the Harry Potter books from a time when interplanetary space travel is common and the books are considered classics, akin to Shakespeare.

I’m breaking up my thoughts on the Harry Potter books into three posts. This week, I’m talking about Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. Next week, I’ll talk about Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix. And the week after that, assuming I’ve finished reading them, I will talk about Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows. These posts are not reviews like my other posts. I will write spoiler-free reviews at some point in the future (probably for next year’s reread). These posts will be my thoughts and notes as I read the entire book, so there will be spoilers. All the spoilers. If you have not read the Harry Potter books and plan to in the future and don’t want to be spoiled in what will probably be a very confusing way, these are not the posts for you. If you have no interest in the inner workings of my brain while I’m reading these books, these are also not the posts for you. You have been warned.

Also, I ask a lot of questions in these thoughts. I’m sure there are answers out there on the web, especially on Pottermore, but I’m generally confining these posts to what’s contained in the books themselves. Also last I checked (admittedly a few years ago, thanks law school), Pottermore wasn’t all that accessible with a screenreader.

So without further ado, here is what struck me as I reread Harry potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of secrets this year.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Since I was living in the query trenches for my own novel when I started rereading this book, I was struck by the first chapter of the first book. I never thought much about the first chapter, which I always viewed as more of a prologue. But this time as I was reading it I was really dissecting what the point was. And I’m not sure there is a point other than to be mysterious. Everything that is introduced in the first chapter is introduced again in the subsequent chapters in a much more dynamic and developed way, and the second chapter is a more intriguing place to start the book. We all know that J. K. Rowling was rejected a lot before she got a book deal—this is like the thing that nonwriters quote at me whenever I said I was trying to get an agent—but this is the first time I really considered why that might be the case. When you submit a book, you usually submit a query letter and the first few pages, maybe the first chapter. And I can definitely see, because I’ve done it myself now, why the first Harry Potter book would get rejected so much. Don’t get me wrong, I love the first book to pieces, but the opening could have been a lot stronger.

So Dumbledore has a scar above his knee that’s an exact map of the london underground. Which makes me wonder: Does he reference that?

I really admire how so much of what happens in Diagon Alley isn’t just important for world building but is also setup for later in this book and later in the series. I really admire when a writer puts things together so well, and that’s one of the things I love about this series is just how well everything comes together.

I just love little innocent eleven-year-old Harry.

I don’t think we ever learn what the point of studying astronomy is. I’m all for studying astronomy, but every other class connects in some way to magic and this one doesn’t. Astrology comes up later in divination but that’s always treated as a joke. So what is the point of astronomy?

Why couldn’t Snape just heal his leg with magic after Fluffy bites it? Or go to Madam Pomphrey? Or get Dumbledore to do it if he doesn’t want anyone else to know?

When they’re looking for Nicholas Flammel, my first thought is that muggle-borns nowadays, used to google and smartphones, would be in for a nasty shock when they go to Hogwarts and there isn’t even electricity. I’m not even sure there’s a card catalogue for the Hogwarts library—at least it’s never mentioned. I would totally read the story about a muggle-born going to Hogwarts in 2019 and having to abandon their iPhone.

When I was a kid, it always really impressed me how Ron knew what the winged key would look like by looking for one that matches the handle. It must be a visual thing that keys match locks, which of course I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid, but even then as a twelve-year-old under pressure I don’t think I would have made the connection like that.

I love the potions logic problem. It reminds me of an LSAT logic problem, and I honest to goodness loved those. I try to diagram it every time I read it, but I’ve never managed to get it myself. I always got stuck with how to figure out which one of the end bottles lets you go forward and which one lets you go back. And I know, as someone who was just talking about the wonders of Google, maybe I should have looked it up. But I was determined that one of these days I would figure it out. And this year, I finally got it. In case anybody else has been as mystified as me, here’s how to do it.

First, here’s the riddle:

Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind,

Two of us would help you, whichever you would find,

One among us seven will let you move ahead,

Another will transport the drinker back instead,

Two among our number hold only nettle wine,

Three of us are killers, waiting hidden in line.

Choose, unless you wish to stay here forevermore,

To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:

First, however slyly the poison tries to hide,

You will always find some on nettle wine’s left side;

Second, different are those who stand at either end,

But if you would move onward, neither is your friend;

Third, as you see clearly, both are different size,

Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides;

Fourth, the second left and the second on the right,

Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight.

And here’s how I solved it:

We have seven bottles, lined up on a table from smallest to largest. Three are nettle wine, two are poison, one lets you go forward through the black fire, and one lets you go back through the purple fire. Number the bottles 1 to 7 from left to right (because I’m treating this like at LSAT logic game). We know that neither bottle 1 nor bottle 7 is poison. We know that bottle 2 and bottle 6 are the same. So bottle 2 and bottle 6 could be wine, because there are 2 bottles of wine, but we also know that you will always find poison to the left of the nettle wine. Repeat, always. So if bottles 2 and 6 are wine, that means that bottle 1 is poison, and we know from the third clue that bottle 1 isn’t poison (we’re assuming of course that the poison is deadly, but it doesn’t work if you don’t assume that). So if 2 and 6 can’t be the wine, and they’re identical, they have to each be poison. That means that bottle number 3 has to be wine. What about bottle 7?  The second clue seems to indicate that bottles 1 and 7 won’t be your friend if you want to move forward, but forward is danger, as it says in the intro. So let’s come back to that. If 7 is wine, that would allow 6 to be poison, and leaves us with bottles 1, 4, and 5 to contend with. We know that 1 can’t be wine, because no poison to the left of it, and the clues say it isn’t poison. So bottle 1 will either let you go forward or backward. So 1 will let you go forward or back, 2 is poison, 3 is wine, 4 will either let you go forward or back or it’s poison, 5 will either let you go forward or back or it’s poison, 6 is poison, and 7 is wine. But that’s not completely solved, and I’m not seeing another clue to get you the last step.

But there’s another way to do it: 1 will either take you forward or back, 2 is poison, 3 is wine, 4 is poison, 5 is wine, 6 is poison, 7 will take you forward or back. There are three poisons and 2 wines and 7 spots, so one poison automatically won’t be directly to the left of nettle wine. Also, the pairing of the dwarf and giant twice in the second and third clues, particularly the third clue, hints that they have similar qualities—specifically fireproofing qualities. Finally, this is a much neater arrangement that fits with all the clues, and the clues are supposed to lead you to an answer.

So how do you know whether 1 or 7 will take you onward and which one will take you back? The third clue says “if you would move onward, neither is your friend.” Taken figuratively, it means one bottle will take you back, so it’s not your friend, and one bottle will take you into more danger, so it’s not your friend either. And that’s always how I read it. But you can also read it literally: if you want to go on, your friend isn’t coming with you. And so bottle number 1, the smallest bottle that will only hold enough potion for one person, will let you go forward, and bottle 7 will send you back.

Voilá. I solved it. That being said, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable enough with that solution to drink a potion and walk through fire. Given that it took me years to figure it out, I am very, very impressed with Hermione. Of course I always have been. Nobody else I know memorizes all their textbooks.

I love the twist in this book. It does such a great job of setting up Snape as the bad guy, and yet it makes perfect sense that it’s Quirrel. Voldemort sticking out of the back of Quirrel’s head is totally terrifying (like I can’t believe I first read this when I was eight). And how Harry manages to hold him off is great.

And then Neville wins them the house cup! I will always love Dumbledore for that!

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

When I first read this book when I was a kid, I didn’t like it that much. I honestly don’t remember why. I mean okay it’s not my favorite in the series, but now when I read it, it’s so intense, and it gives me so many feelings.

The Dursleys are the worst. I wondered when I read the last book, and I feel like especially here it bears repeating, where is child services? Like when Harry and Dudley went to the same school, Harry’s teachers must have been able to tell that Harry was being neglected. He didn’t even have clothes that fit and his glasses were held together by tape. Come on people.

I know that the sixth book comes back to what happened in the second book because of Tom Riddle’s diary, but there’s also a lot of other stuff in this book that becomes important in the sixth book. Basically everything in the scene at Borgan and Burkes—the hand of glory, the opal necklace, even Harry hiding in the vanishing cabinet—are key to the sixth book. Later on, when Harry and Ron are disguised as Crabbe and Goyle, Malfoy reveals his family’s secret chamber under their drawing room floor, which will become important in the seventh book too.

Speaking of Harry hiding in the vanishing cabinet, I have fun imagining the conversation between Harry and McGonigall when he winds up traveling through the cabinets into Hogwarts and showed up at school a month before classes started. I know it’s not how it goes but it would have been a funny scene.

I feel like Harry complains a lot about not having money in the Muggle world. Why doesn’t he change some of his wizard gold for muggle money at any point during the series?

So Harry and Ron definitely cross a line for me when they steal the car to fly to Hogwarts. Like a certain amount of rule-breaking to solve the mystery like in the first book and this book and later on in the series is fine by me. But rule-breaking because the characters are being stupid and don’t think of the obvious solutions, like sending a letter to Hogwarts or waiting for Ron’s parents, kind of annoys me. Yes the car being at Hogwarts is important later, but I’m just kind of meh about how it gets there. (I like it when my characters are fundamentally smart and good.)

I love Colin Creevey. He is so cute, and he is also so brave. Annoying, yes, but it takes guts to approach a stranger and ask them for a photo. Not to mention the guts it takes to stick up for Harry against Malfoy.

Why doesn’t Hogwarts have a stash of spare wands? Or a contact with Olivander? It’s a wizard school. Accidents happen, right? Ron basically goes the whole year without doing magic, and his broken wand is frankly dangerous.

Speaking of Ron going the whole year with a broken wand, he isn’t the only one who misses large chunks of their education this year. Colin, Justin, Penelope Clearwater, Hermione, and even Ginny to some extent miss months of classes. I assume that in the first and second year it probably isn’t hugely important, but Percy’s girlfriend is a sixth year. How does she make that up? And when they cancel all exams at the end of the book, does that cover OWLS and NEWTS? These are just some questions I have.

Spiders continue to be scary, Lockhart continues to be a complete douchebag, and the ending of this book is just great. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

And that’s it for my thoughts on the first two books. I’ll be back next week to chat about the third, fourth, and fifth books.

The Final Empire Review

As I mentioned a couple days ago in my March Reading Roundup post, I’m trying out writing individual posts for each book I read and review, rather than one giant post at the end of each month. So here goes.

Cover of The Final Empire by Brandon SandersonLast month, I read The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. This is the first book in the Mistborn series, and since I’m definitely continuing on with the series and planning to write reviews for the next books, I wanted to write a full review of this book. As with all my reviews, this will be as spoiler-free as I can make it.

The Final Empire is epic fantasy. It was originally published as adult fantasy but I think since has been remarketed as young adult. I could see it going either way myself. This was my first Brandon Sanderson book, and I am just so glad I picked it up because it is awesome!

The Final Empire is set in a dystopian world that’s a rough analog to the early 1800s in terms of technology (or so Wikipedia tells me). Ash falls from the sky during the days, and at night supernatural mists terrorize the peasant population. A thousand years ago, the prophecied Hero of Ages fought off something called the Deepness and ascended to become the tyrant and god-king of the empire. He calls himself the Lord Ruler, and he keeps the empire on a tight leash. Only the nobility are allowed to possess magic, and the inquisitors, the police force of literal monsters are vicious in enforcing that, since magic is a genetic trait. And the peasants, or Skaa, are brutally enslaved. This is a world where the bad guy has won.

Not only has he won, but he has been in power for a thousand years. So when a street urchin named Vin is approached by Kelsier, told she can do magic, and asked to join in a plot to overthrow the Lord Ruler, she’s pretty sure he’s crazy. Vin is sixteen, and she has lived in truly desperate circumstances for her whole life. The only person who ever looked out for her, her older brother, also abused her and later abandoned her. She goes with Kelsier because she wants to learn to use her magical powers and because the inquisitors are looking for her and she needs protection, but it takes her a long time before she trusts him and his thieving crew.

Let me take a minute to talk about the magic system in this world. The main kind of magic is called Allomancy. Allomancers can consume pure metals and then burn them within their bodies to gain powers. Each metal does something different, and the metals work in pairs. For example, steel and iron allow a certain amount of telekinesis with metal—one lets you pull metal to you, one lets you push metal away, which you can use to pretty much fly. Tin heightens your senses, and pewter heightens your strength. Bronze helps you sense and strengthen others’ emotions, and copper shields your emotions—and the fact that you’re doing Allomancy at all—from others. You get the idea. There are ten metals total. Most Allomancers can only use one. A rare few Allomancers, which includes Kelsier and Vin, can use all the metals. They are called Mistborn.

Throughout the novel, we follow Vin and Kelsier. Kelsier trains Vin, and also the reader, in how Allomancy works and how to use the magic, and they put their plans against the Lord Ruler into action. Apart from studying her Allomancy, Vin becomes the crew’s spy. She infiltrates the nobility, disguised as the niece of a cooperative nobleman, and plants seeds that the crew hope will grow into a house war to destabilize the highest levels of society. Kelsier helps out with this with a few assassinations, while other members of the crew recruit and train soldiers for a Skaa army. The eventual goal is to topple the government by basically stealing the whole treasury, including all the stores of Allomantic metals. Of course, it isn’t going to be that easy. Anything and everything is going to go wrong, but throughout it all, Vin learns how to trust the new crew that has taken her in, and even how to become friends with them.

When I was in college,I worked as a submissions reader for the Kenyon Review. During one of our annual training sessions on how to read submissions, one editor said that he knew when a story was right for the magazine when reading it caused him physical pain, because the story is so good that it hurts that you didn’t write it. I related this description to my writing group, and writer’s pain became the highest compliment we could give each other’s work.

So when I say that The Final Empire gave me writer’s pain, I want you to understand exactly what I mean. This was so good. It was beyond good. It blew me away. It may be the best book I’ve read in a while. I could go on and on showering it with praise, but instead let’s talk about why.

The plot: The plot in this book is so tight and so compelling. It grabbed me up from page one and did not let go until the end. Arguably, it still hasn’t let go. We’re talking about a book that starts with the idea of a revolution and carries that idea through to its conclusion, and doesn’t even take that long to do it. The book is only 500-ish pages. (Has my feeling on what makes a long book been skewed slightly because of The Way of Kings? Maybe. Probably.) Whether you think 500 pages is long, medium, or short, there’s very little downtime in this book. That’s not to say that it’s all action all the time, though the action scenes are great. There is dancing and socializing and a romantic subplot and so many feelings. Remember I said that Vin is learning how to trust people and make friends and all that? That does not happen while they’re fighting off inquisitors all the time. Which brings me to…

The characters: I just loved them all!Especially Vin. They are so rich and strong and beautiful and flawed and it is wonderful. I love the group chemistry of the thieving crew. I love how they each have their own role but they plan together as a team. I love how they all have these moments when they break. One of my favorite moments in the book is when Vin just snaps at all of them because even though they’re Skaa too, they’ve never known what it’s like to live on the street the way she has, and then when Kelsier goes after her and calms her down and she’s now all embarrassed for flipping out, Kelsier is like “we all say stupid things sometimes, it’s cool, also you’re right.” It’s just a great moment, and the book is so full of great moments like these, largely because of these characters. And the characters’ arcs are perfection. (But in case you didn’t know, I’m a sucker for mistreated orphan finds family and learns to love stories.)

The world building and the magic system: I thought the world was really cool and mysterious, and there’s so much left to explore in the rest of the series. I really appreciated how detailed Sanderson was when describing exactly how the magic worked and what its limitations were. It was refreshing to have everything laid out so clearly.

The ending: Everything came together so well, and it was painful and messy and glorious. And while most everything was wrapped up, and I’m pretty sure you could stop reading after this book if you wanted to, enough was left dangling to entice me into the sequel. Plus i just love the world and these characters so much and I’m not ready to leave them.

No book can be absolutely perfect, and there were a couple things that bothered me. The biggest one is the romantic subplot. Vin falls in love with one of the nobles she’s supposed to be luring into a house war. This complicates the plot and it complicates Vin’s feelings for everyone involved. It wasn’t a bad plot move by any means. I actually quite like it as a natural outgrowth of Vin learning how good feelings work. My problem is with the love interest in particular. In a book populated with so many rich and vivid characters, he was just kind of meh to me. I think this is at least partly because I, like some of the other members of the crew, saw him as distracting Vin from what she was supposed to be doing. But I just didn’t like him too much. He was kind of a well-intentioned and well-read idiot. I’m trying to remain open-minded about him though, because I’m guessing he will be more important in the plot of the second book.

Other than that and a few other small things, this was such a good book. I was crying at the end. A lot. And I am dying to dive in to the rest of the series.

If you haven’t read any Brandon Sanderson before, I think this might be a good place to start. As I said, it was my first Sanderson book, and I know a number of other people who read this as their first Sanderson book as well. It’s significantly shorter than some of his other work, so it’s not as much of a time investment as another book might be.*Coughs The Way of Kings.* I’ve heard The Final Empire compared to V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series. There are certainly similarities. In both, an older magician takes in a street urchin and trains her in magic and brings her into his plans and adventures. And in one book the magician is named Kell and in the other it’s Kelsier. The audiobook narrator for The Final Empire is even the same as the audiobook narrator for the second and third Shades of Magic books. The similarities pretty much end there, in my opinion, but I think it is true that if you liked A Darker Shade of Magic you will probably like The Final Empire. Oh, and they’re both fabulous! In case I hadn’t mentioned that already.

If you haven’t read The Final Empire, I hope this review helps you decide to pick it up. It is so worth it! And if you have read the book, do you agree with my opinions? Do you disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments.

March Reading Roundup

It’s still hard to believe, but it’s April now. It’s been a pretty crazy month, what with my regular homework and not-so-regular class projects, starting to apply for the bar, going down to D.C. for spring break, and then flying to Florida this week for an interview. I redesigned my website too, and I upgraded things so there shouldn’t be ads anymore. I’ve also been going home a lot, because I have five day weekends now and home is so close. It’s great, but it’s been a lot. It’s also hard to believe that I only have four weeks of classes left before finals, and then I’m done with my 3L year.

Before we dive into the books I read in March, I have a couple quick announcements. This is not an April Fools Day joke, either. Since I’m trying to post more regularly on this blog, I’m going to start doing individual reviews of books, instead of a big post every month with all the books I’ve read that month. Since I’m in the middle of a few series, I will take some time in April and May to write full reviews for books in the series I have already started this year. All the reviews will still be spoiler free, and I think I’ll still do a monthly recap post to sum up the month, but it will be shorter than these have been. This is an experiment for all of us, so feedback will definitely be appreciated.

I’ve also updated my book recs page. Books are now organized by category and then alphabetically by author’s last name. As I start writing individual reviews, I’ll link to them from that page as well.

Finally, please feel free to recommend books to me in the comments of any of my book-related posts or else use my contact form here. You should have a good sense of what I like and don’t like at this point, but I’m always happy to try new things. I will put all books recommended to me on this blog into a jar and pick at least one to read each month.

Now, let’s take a look at what I read this month.

A collage of the covers of the nine books I read in March: The Final Empire, The Burning Maze, Wren Journeymage, Beartown, The Way of Kings, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle, Found, and Home.
Covers from Goodreads

I read nine more books in March, bringing my grand total for 2019 up to 28. I would have read more, but one of these books was massive and took me two weeks to read. Also like I said it was a crazy month. Eight of the books I read were fantasy, and one was a contemporary. On the whole, this was a great reading month. I absolutely loved so many of the books I read, and everything I read was fun and thought provoking. Let’s dive in.

My first March book was The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. This is the first book in the Mistborn series, and the first book I’ve ever read by Brandon Sanderson. I’m going to talk about this one in much more detail this week, so I’ll keep these thoughts brief, but oh my god, I was completely blown away by this book! I totally understand the hype, it is definitely well deserved, and I’ve already purchased the next two books in the series.

Next, I read the third Trials of Apollo book, The Burning Maze by Rick Riordan. I’m also going to talk about this in more detail later on. This was definitely a fun read. Apollo is trying to free the third trapped oracle and stop a certain Roman emperor from taking over California. We learn a lot more about Meg’s backstory in this book, and of course we have Rick Riordan’s classic fun adventure feel. This was a great ride.

After that, I read the final book in the Wren series, Wren Journeymage by Sherwood Smith. Wren and her friends have finally brought peace to the kingdom, or so Wren thinks, when her old enemy, Hawk, rides into town with intentions of courting Tess. Worse, Tess knew he was coming, and she didn’t tell Wren. Angry with her friend for not trusting her advice, Wren leaves Tyron to try to persuade her to see sense and sets off to find Connor and some more adventure. There are smugglers, pirates, sea battles, cool magic, spies, and even more old enemies. This book was so much fun, and it really pulled the whole series together. While the second and third books felt a bit scattered to me, this felt a lot more unified, and it was a nice conckusion to the series. I did end up having to buy the audiobook because it wasn’t available in Braille, but no, I did not hate the narrator.

Next, I read Beartown by Fredrik Backman. Fredrik Backman also wrote And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, which I read last December and adored, and I found I loved this book just as much. And it’s about hockey. I never thought I would love a book that’s centered on a sport so much, but I did. There’s a sequel, which I’m waiting to get from the library, so like the other books I’m going to talk about this in a lot more detail later this month. I’ll give you a quick synopsis though. The book is told from the point of view of a failing town whose last hope of survival is that their junior hockey team wins the national championship. They’re so, so close, and this is the only thing that matters to anyone in town. And then a fifteen-year-old girl accuses the star hockey player of raping her, and everything explodes. This book is so powerful and utterly incredible. I was literally up all night reading it, and I have a ton more to say, so stay tuned.

And now for the book that took me two weeks to read, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. This is another start to a series, so I’ll be doing a full review next week. Good thing too, because there is no way I can describe this in one paragraph. It is epic fantasy at its most epic, roughly a thousand pages of epic. I found it to be very daunting to even pick up, but after The Final Empire I had total faith in Sanderson’s ability to make every one of those thousand pages count, and for the most part he did. My very brief thoughts are that I’m not entirely convinced it had to be as long as it was, but the plotting and the world building were superb, and the way it all came together in the end was fabulous! More soon on this one.

In the last few days of March, I powered through the last two books of the Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, and then the last two books in the Magic Thief series by Sarah Prineas, Found and Home. I really liked The Silver Chair. Eustace is brought back into Narnia along with his classmate Jill, and Aslan sends them on a mission to find Caspian’s son, who was kidnapped by The White Witch (the witch of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe). Accompanied by the marshwiggle Puddleglum, they journey north, facing man-eating giants, solving puzzles, and descending below the Earth to confront the witch in her underground layer guarded by enchanted gnomes. Overall, it was a good read. On the other hand, I found The Last Battle to be disappointing. The religious overtones were too much, and there was so much racism and sexism, and also just the plot didn’t make any sense. Like the monkey convinces the donkey to dress up as Aslan for a joke, and then somehow the monkey allies himself with the Calormen, and this ends the world? Okay that’s an oversimplification but you get the idea. On the whole, it was a disappointing end to the series.

But the last two books in the Magic Thief series were fabulous. As you might recall, I read the first two books toward the end of last year, and while I liked them, there was something missing, and I struggled to really be drawn in. The third and fourth book had that something, and I was sucked right in. These two books made the whole series awesome for me. In Found, the dark magic is threatening the city, but Conn needs to find a new locus stone so he can fight against it. So he goes on a journey and finds… dragons. And the adventure goes from there. The fourth book, Home, finds Conn dealing with new conflicts and old enemies and trying to figure out just who he is and what he’s meant to do in the world. This was another one that did a great job tying the whole series together. I liked it lots.

And that’s it for March. Have you read any of these books? Do you agree with my opinions?