Tag: Brandon Sanderson

September Reading Roundup

Hello. It’s mid-October, fall is upon us and covid cases are on the rise again, but I’m here to tell you about all the books I read in September. I keep trying to jrite this post earlier in the month, but this time I don’t feel that bad, because I spent the first half of this month writing and editing a short story. I haven’t finished a short story in a couple years, because of law school and the bar and working on novels, but also because writing short stories is hard guys. So this feels like a big accomplishment and I don’t mind that other things took a back seat this month.

Collage of the books I read in September: City of Bones, City of Ashes, The Bands of Mourning, Showing Off, A Song Below Water, Rules for Thieves, The Arctic Incident, and The Kiss of DeceptionBut here I am now to talk about books again. I read eight books in September. Two of them were in Braille, bringing my total number of Braille books I’ve read this year up to ten, which means I’m ahead of the game for once. Three of the books I read this month, including the two Braille books, were rereads. I started a few new series and continued others I’ve been working on. No stand-alones this month.

Honestly, I was less happy with the books I read this month than I’ve been in the past few months. There were a few books that I really liked, of course, but there were also a few that were fine but ultimately just kind of so-so for me. Almost everything I read this month was some kind of fantasy. So let’s just dive right in.

First, I reread the first two Mortal Instruments books, City of Bones and City of Glass by Cassandra Clare. Just before she turns sixteen, Clary Fray discovers she is far from the ordinary teenager she thought she was when her mother is kidnapped by demons. Clary is a Shadowhunter, a demon slayer, and together with her new Shadowhunter friends and her barely discovered powers, she sets off to find and save her mother. I haven’t reread these books since before law school, and it was really great to pick them up again. No, they aren’t the most fabulous books in the world, but they are fast and fun and full of feelings, and right now that’s about all I need.

After that I got the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s second Mistborn trilogy, The Bands of Mourning. Wax and his team of trusty investigators are sent off to find the Lord Ruler’s metalminds, before the bad guys do, of course. I felt pretty much the same way about this book that I’ve felt about the first two books in the series. It was really slow for a long time and then it picked up and became really interesting, but unfortunately, I also just don’t feel as connected to these characters as I want to.

Then I read the third Upside-Down Magic book, Showing Off by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. In this book, Nory and her friends in the Upside-Down Magic class are faced with a whole new challenge: a school talent show ⋅ coneaen ieass has to compete. And Nory’s father is coming, so whatever they do, it can’t feature their Upside-Down Magic. Meanwhile, Pepper is finally getting a grip on her magic so she doesn’t always scare animals witless, and she and the other UDM kids want to show off their magic at the talent show. I continue to love the Upside-Down Magic Adventures. I especially love how much the characters grow in this book and learn about friendship and their own special power. And Nory’s father is the worst. I can’t wait to read more in this series.

I mentioned a few months ago that I was trying to read more books by authors of color, and this month I finally got A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow out of the library. Tavia is a black girl living in Portland, Oregon, where there aren’t that many other people of color and even fewer with magical powers. Tavia is also a siren, in a world where sirens are feared and persecuted. And her best friend, Effie, is, well, no one is sure but she’s definitely something. Everything is going just fine for them until a well-publicized trial of a man accused of killing his girlfriend begins, and the man claims his girlfriend was a siren as a defense. Then Tavia is pulled over by the police and accidentally uses her siren-call to get them to leave her alone, and Effie is blacking out and shedding skin and maybe turning people to stone. And suddenly staying silent is too much for Tavia. I really loved so much about this book. A lot happens, and there’s a lot of feelings, and it speaks to the current moment in our lives so well. I particularly loved Tavia’s and Effie’s friendship. On the other hand, I really struggled with the pacing in this book. Even while dealing with all this stuff, it still managed to be really slow for most of the book, and It switched from slow to fast and fast to slow so abruptly that it often threw me out of the story. So while I really did enjoy this book, it’s not one I would leap to first to recommend. On the other hand there’s a sequel or companion novel or something on the way, and I will most certainly read that.

Then I finally finished Rules for Thieves by Alexandra Ott. I’ve been trying to read this for almost six months. I read the first half of this book in Braille, but gave up because the copy I had on my BrailleNote had too many issues, so I switched to having it read to me by this app on my phone. When twelve-year-old Alli runs away from her orphanage, she gets blasted by a curse that will spread and eventually kill her. The cure, however, is super expensive. Her new friend Beck proposes she comes back to the thieves guild with him and joins, because the salary will cover the cost of the cure. This was a fun book about belonging and right and wrong, and on the whole I enjoyed it. I did feel like I had a hard time getting into it, probably because of the problems I was having in Braille and then listening to it being read to me by a robot voice. I also found I had a hard time connecting with A’li as a character. I felt like I never understood why she wanted to run away from the orphanage so badly, especially because she was going to be released in a few months anyway. And this made it hard for me to grasp the rest of the world and the stakes and everything. And while she clearly thought of herself as sassy, she came across as more annoying and whiny to me. There is a sequel to this book, but I’m not sure I’m going to read it.

Next, I read The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer, the second Artemis Fowl book. In this book, Artemis is trying to find his father, and Holly and the fairy police are trying to deal with a goblin rebellion. Holly and Artemis make a deal to exchange hlp and team up, and it’s really great. I just love the adventures and the teamwork and the character development we get in this book. An excellent second book to this series.

And I finished off September with The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, the first book in The Remnant Chronicles. I read this series last year, and I believe I told you I had a full post on this book on the way. Well a year later I finally finished writing that post and will post it by the end of this week, so I’m not going to say much more than I continue to love this book and this series.

And that’s it for September. As usual, let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy, and if you haven’t already, be sure to vote by November 3.

April and May Reading Roundup

Well here we are, more than halfway through June, and as usual, I’m abysmally late on posting this. I admit, I’ve been putting it off, because it feels ridiculously insensitive to be posting about the books I read in April and May with the world in the state it’s in. I don’t like to talk about politics online, and anyway I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times and much more eloquently than I could. But I also can’t stay silent.

At the time I’m writing this, more than one hundred twenty-five thousand people have died from the coronavirus in our country. People are still calling it a hoax and refusing to wear masks. I viscerally hate masks, but wearing one saves lives, so it’s really the only decent thing to do. The pandemic is disproportionately affecting people of color, and meanwhile, our president is focused solely on bringing back the economy and winning the upcoming election. And I get that bringing back the economy is important, I do, but we need to do so safely, and based on the rising number of Covid-19 cases in more than half the country, safety still isn’t the watchword, and this endangers everyone, particularly the people of color who will continue to be disproportionately harmed by the pandemic because of the way our society is built. Last, and certainly not least, we have been reeling over the brutal police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, and then the police brutality and attacks by right-wing extremists against the peaceful protestors who have come out against the murders and the systemic racism and oppression that enable them. It is high time we are protesting, in all the ways we can, and I only hope we can keep the momentum up through November and beyond, because our country needs real, drastic change. I don’t pretend to know everything there is to know about these issues, but I’m reading and I’m learning and I’m sharing. I am furious. I am furious, and heartbroken, and so stressed out I’m worried I’ve hurt my jaw with all the teeth-grinding I’ve been doing.

Most of this has come about since the end of May. But before that, in April and most of May, I was sheltering in place and freaking out about Covid. And learning all this important stuff. In April, I was so stressed out that I only read one book. I couldn’t focus on anything, and even though I started a bunch of other books, they were mostly library books, and I didn’t finish them before they expired, and then I had to get back on the waiting list. In May, though, I read thirteen books of all different genres. Some were rereads, but most were new. I read three books in Braille which brings my total of Braille books for the year up to four. Still behind where I should be for my goal, but yay!Collage of the covers of the 14 books I read in April and May: Ember Queen; Shadows of Self; The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; The Deceivers; Circe; There There; the first three Harry Potter books; Spark; Supernova; Daja's Book; Fantastic Mr. Fox and Other Animal Stories; and The Light Between Worlds.

The only book I read in April was Ember Queen by Laura Sebastian, the third book in the Ash Princess trilogy, which came out in February. Anything I say about the plot of this book will spoil the first two if you haven’t already read them. But let’s just say that things are heating up for Theo and her rebellion. Quite literally. I love what Laura Sebastian does with the characters in this book. I particularly love what she does with the villains, and the villains throughout the entire series. It’s really interesting from a writing perspective, and also just so well done. I loved this whole series and would definitely recommend it.

I started off May by finishing Shadows of Self, the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s second Mistborn Trilogy. In this book, Wax is investigating a set of highly improbable murders. We get a lot of Wax’s backstory from before he returned to the city too. I enjoyed this book, but the first two thirds were quite slow by Sanderson’s standards. The ending was heartbreaking though, and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

Next, I read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. This is the first book in the Wayfarers series, though as I’ve since discovered these books all stand alone and are actually just interconnected novels in the same universe, which I love. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows Rosemary, who has signed on as a clerk for a spaceship which creates new wormholes for other ships in the Galactic Commons to use to travel. The ship, the Wayfarer, has an interspecies crew of delightful characters, who embrace Rosemary wholeheartedly. But Rosemary has a secret, and when they are asked to travel for almost a year to build a wormhole to a kplanet at war with the rest of its solar systemand threatening war against the rest of the Galactic Commons, Rosemary’s secret is in danger of coming out. This is the best description I can give this book, because the plot is a bit thin. I’ve seen some reviews claim that this book doesn’t have a plot, but it definitely does. It’s just a very episodic novel, filled with different adventures for each of the crew members. We already know that happy space adventures are 100% my thing, but oh this book was just so much fun! Also it has a great title! It was exactly what I needed to be reading while the world falls apart, and this was the book that really got me out of my April reading slump. I just love it so much, and if you love fun, heartwarming, delightful space adventures too, I highly recommend you give this book a shot.

In May, I started my annual Harry Potter reread. I reread the first three books, Sorcerer’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, and Prisoner of Azkaban. This time, I was rereading them in Braille. I read these books before J. K. Rowling made all those awful transphobic comments on twitter, and I’ve been working through how I feel about her and the books ever since. Working through my feelings about JKR was pretty easy actually. I’ve been cranky with her ever since Cursed Child, honestly, and we’ve all known she’s transphobic before now, but the fact that she refused to learn from the countless people trying to tell her that her comments are hurtful, hateful, and dangerous for the trans community was too much for me. I’ve been bullied and excluded all my life because I am blind, and I cannot abide anyone who hates and attacks anyone else just because of who they are. So now JKR is she-who-must-not-be-named to me. Sorting out what to do about my feelings for the Harry Potter books themselves is much more complicated. I love these books so much, and I can’t just turn that love off. They have shaped who I am as a person and a writer. I recognize they aren’t great in terms of representation, and they’re actually pretty terrible on some of the sub-issues of the books (the house-elves only ever get better masters but as a species remain enslaved; anyone fat is a terrible person or just plain stupid; Snape is really abusive, but because he’s ultimately a good guy, he’s totally forgiven for that; I could go on). For me personally, I feel it’s important to continue to engage with the books, both because I do love the characters and the story and the fundamental themes of love and acceptence, and because I want to continue to study these books critically and learn from their shortcomings. However I understand that publicly supporting or discussing the books could cause real harm to my trans friends, and I absolutely do not want to do that. I have taken my Hogwarts house off my social media profiles and bios, and I won’t be wearing or displaying any Harry Potter swag in the future. And if I reread the books, I’ll keep it to myself. As I said above, I don’t pretend to know or understand all the issues at play here, but I will keep learning. And as I do, this tentative balance I’ve come to might change. All I’ll say for now is that I reread the first three Harry Potter books in May. Moving on.

Meanwhile, I read The Deceivers by Margaret Peterson Haddix, the sequel to The Strangers which I read earlier this year. In this book, Chess, Emma, and Finn and their friend Natalie have to venture back into the alternate world to rescue their mothers. This book is so much fun, and it’s got a lot of twists and turns. It was a great sequel to The Strangers, and I can’t wait for the third book to come out.

I also read Circe by Madeline Miller. This was another book I started in April but didn’t finish before my library copy expired and had to get back on the waitlist. We were trying to get my Harvard Law School book club back together, virtually, to discuss this, which is why I picked it up, but that discussion never happened, sadly. Circe is a retelling of Greek mythology from Circe’s point of view. It goes through her entire life, from her birth and her childhood, to her exile, and so on. I don’t want to spoil it in case you don’t know the Greek mythology, if you do know the mythology, I’m sorry to say you know the whole book. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with Circe, especially because it’s gotten so many glowing reviews. Madeline Miller’s writing was very beautiful, if a tad melodramatic at times. But she didn’t add anything new to the story, and so it really dragged for me. I can see why people liked it, but it honestly just wasn’t for me.

Next, I read There There by Tommy Orange. This is a book that follows several Native American characters in modern-day Oakland, as they all prepare to attend a big powwow in Oakland. I’m ashamed to admit that aside from what I learned in elementary schools and the few books I read then, I know very little about modern-day Native American culture. I really enjoyed reading about all these different characters, but I admit that I got a bit lost because there were so many characters and they all connected in different ways. I also felt like it was a little too convenient how it all came together in the end. I did enjoy this book, but honestly literary fiction has to really wow me for me to recommend it to others, and this didn’t quite do that.

After that, I read Spark by Sarah Beth Durst. I started reading this in Braille but the electronic Braille version I had kept having whole sentences or parts of sentences missing, so I gave up and listened to it. Set in a world where children bond with dragon-like creatures called storm beasts and control the weather, Spark follows Mina, who is very quiet, and her new lightning beast, Pixit, as they learn to harness and control lightning. Mina struggles at the lightning school, because most lightning guardian teams are loud and obnoxious. She doesn’t feel like she fits in, a fact reenforced by her family’s perceptions of her, and she’s sure she’ll never be able to be a real storm guardian. But when Mina and Pixit learn the price of controlling the weather with their power, quiet Mina must learn to speak up. This was a really fun book. I loved watching Mina grow into the person she wants to be, and I just ador Pixit, who is like a dragon puppy. I would definitely recommend this book.

Then I finished Marissa Meyer’s Renegades series with Supernova. This was a great finale to this series. Everything comes to a head so nicely, and yes, a lot of it was still really predictable, but it was also a lot of fun. The only bit I didn’t like was the epilogue, which put a twist on everything and really didn’t feel like an ending at all. Now if there was going to be more content in the Renegades world, I’d be fine with it, but as it stands it didn’t work for me as an ending. Still, I really enjoyed the whole series.

After that, I reread the third Circle of Magic book, Daja’s Book by Tamora Pierce. I always love these books. They’re so much fun and really great to reread in times of stress. In Daja’s Book, the four young mages have traveled north with Sandry’s uncle, the duke, and their teachers to figure out how to help with a drought. Since they spun their magic together, the four’s magic has changed and is now getting out of control in some really weird ways, and they have to deal with that. Also forest fires. But the real joy of this book is how Daja has to confront her past and the people who cast her out after her family died in a shipwreck. When Daja accidentally creates a vine of living metal, a Trader caravan  offers to buy it, and Daja gets to interact with her people for the first time in months. This is a really great book, and as I’ve said before, I really recommend this whole series.

I then took a break for something fun and silly and listened to Fantastic Mr. Fox and Other Animal Stories by Roald Dahl. This was a collection of a bunch of different short animal stories: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Esio Trot, The Enormous Crocodile, and The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me. We had this audiobook when I was a kid, and I remember listening to it on some car ride, but nothing else. This was quick and fun and very silly, which was really nice.

Finally, I read The Light Between Worlds by Laura E. Weymouth, and guys, this might be my favorite book of 2020 so far. The Light Between Worlds reminds me a lot of Narnia, but it’s everything I didn’t know I wanted from Narnia. The story is about three children who are whisked into a magical world in the middle of an air raid in World War II, and the book alternates between their adventures in the fantasy world and their lives five years after they’ve returned home. It particularly focuses on the youngest child, Evelyn, who grew up in the fantasy world and is really struggling back in our world. This is an absolutely beautiful book that just gave me so many feelings: It’s the sort of book that I have been not just recommending to everyone but buying for everyone too. You absolutely have to read this one!

And that’s it for April and May of this year. My plan is to have my June reading post up not too long after the end of June, because this is ridiculous. If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to talk about them. And I hope some of these books might help you find some light in these dark times. Take care of yourselves, and I’ll be back soon.

January Reading Roundup

January felt like a very, very long month this year. This is the first year that I’m working full time and didn’t have a long break from mid-December through mid-January, which was definitely part of the feeling that January lasted forever. But a lot happened in January too. I started writing every morning before work, a friend from college came to visit for the weekend, I made a ton of progress on my revisions, and then I got the flu and a post-flu ear/sinus issue that I’m still dealing with. It was a lot.

Collage of the 14 books I read in January: Savvy, Scumble, Switch, The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages, The Whispering Trees, Well of Witches, First Test, Page, Squire, Lady Knight, Girl in the Blue Coat, and A Pocket Full of MurderI also read 14 books in January, which gets me well on my way toward my 100 book goal for 2020. I read three complete series this month, continued with a series that I was in the middle of, started a new series, and read one stand-alone. I only read half a book in Braille and switched to audio when I got the flu. And all of the books I read but one were fantasy, mostly middle grade fantasy but one adult fantasy series. The non-fantasy book I read this month was historical fiction. I really liked almost all the books I read too, so on the whole this was a really good reading month.

First, I blazed through the Savvy trilogy by Ingrid Law. I read the first two books, Savvy and Scumble, on New Years Day, and the third book, Switch, the day after. These books take place in contemporary midwest and west America and follow a sprawling family with magical powers. The first book follows Mibs, who gets her magical powers—called a Savvy—on her thirteenth birthday like the rest of her siblings, and sets off with two of her brothers and some new friends to try to get to the hospital where her father is in a coma after a car accident. It’s a crazy adventure and a ton of fun. The second book follows Mibs’s cousin as he tries to get his savvy of dismantling anything metal under control. And the third book follows Mibs’s younger sister after everyone in the family’s powers suddenly switch and they’re stuck with new powers just as they’re trying to help their very unmagical grandmother move to come live with them. These three books are more like related companion novels than a series with a single arc, but they are just all so much fun and basically everything I want out of a middle grade fantasy adventure book. I definitely recommend all three.

Next, I read the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. I read the first book in this series, The Final Empire, last year, and I loved it to pieces. I loved it so much that I was afraid to pick up the second book, because I didn’t know where the story was going from here and didn’t want to be disappointed. After reading Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series last year though, I decided I had enough faith in his plotting ability to brave the rest of the series. And… I don’t know. The Final Empire is about a girl who discovers she is a mistborn, someone with the ability to unlock the powers of various metals. She’s taken on by a thieving crew working to overthrow the evil dictator known as the Lord Ruler. I have a full review of The Final Empire over here, so you can read all about how much I adored this book. The thing is, this plot is very wrapped up by the end of the first book, and so the second book is a very different kind of story. So is the third book. And while the plots of the second and third books definitely follow the first book logically, and both The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages are definitely good books, they don’t feel like a unified story to me. Also, a lot of what I loved about The Final Empire wasn’t present in the sequels. Finally, I know I was sick when I finished The Hero of Ages, but I feel like the ending should have had me balling my eyes out, and I just felt nothing. I know a lot of people really love The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages, and I don’t think they’re bad books by any means. They just weren’t what I wanted them to be, and I ended up kind of disappointed. So while I still absolutely love The Final Empire and will continue to recommend it, I’m not sure I would recommend the rest of the series. On the other hand yes I am definitely planning to go on and read the second Mistborn trilogy which takes place a few hundred years after the events of The Hero of Ages.

While I was reading Mistborn, I also read the second and third Thickety books, The Whispering Trees and Well of Witches by J. A. White. I read the first Thickety book, A Path Begins, in December and loved it. The Whispering Trees picks up where A Path Begins left off, with Kara and Taff running for their lives through the Thickety. In this book, they come face-to-face with the forest demon himself, and things get really scary. I won’t say much about the third book because it would spoil the second, but Kara and Taff go on yet another dark and twisty journey through the well of witches, where the witches go after using the last spell, to try to save their father. I absolutely love how dark and twisted this series is but also how much fun and hope there is. So far this is a really excellent middle grade series. I started the fourth book this evening, and I am already hooked.

Next, I continued my reread of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books with her Protector of the Small series. I read First Test, Page, Squire, and Lady Knight in January. Of the Tamora Pierce I’ve read so far on this reread, these are definitely my favorite. The king decreed that girls could try for their knighthood, and Kel is the first girl to openly train for her shield in Tortall since Alanna the Lioness. The series follows Kel through her training as a page and squire and her first year as a knight as she faces down bullies, immortals, and a system that generally doesn’t want her there. Kel is so different from Alanna, and she faces different struggles because she is openly training to be a knight as a girl. She is very much a heroine it’s easy to get behind and support, and on the whole these books are really well put together and hold up well on reread.

This month I also read Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse. This is a World War II historical fiction book set in Amsterdam. I admit I don’t know much about the war in the Netherlands, so I was very interested in this book. Hanneke works as an undertaker’s secretary and black market delivery girl to support her family. She’s expert at avoiding the Nazis and finding the impossible, but since her boyfriend’s death fighting the Nazis, she has put a premium on her own self-preservation. When one of her black market customers asks her to help find a Jewish girl who ran away from her hiding spot in her house, Hanneke gets pulled into the resistance movement in the city and discovers the true horrors of the war. This was a pretty good book. I liked that it stuck to a narrow focus on these characters and events and didn’t try to include the entire war. I also felt like Hanneke had a really relatable journey, and her emotions and desires were so well-done. I will say that the pacing felt a bit off—the climax came too soon and there was too much denouement—but on the whole I enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

Finally, I finished off January with the first Uncommon Magic book, A Pocket Full of Murder by R. J. Anderson. This is the book that I started reading in Braille and switched to audio when I got the flu. This is a middle grade fantasy set in a kind of steampunk-style world where turn-of-the-century technology is powered by magic. Only the wealthy can afford magic, and the city is teetering on the brink of a workers’ revolution. Twelve-year-old Isaveth’s family is very poor. Her mother has recently died, and her father is out of work, forcing Isaveth’s older sister to drop out of school and get a job at a sewing factory. When Isaveth’s father is arrested for murder of the governor of the university committed using magic only a builder could get their hands on, Isaveth joins forces with a street boy named Quiz to prove her father’s innocence and find the true murderer. But Quiz may not be who he says he is, and Isaveth’s father is keeping secrets too. This was a really good book. I loved how rich the world was and how complicated the problems that Isaveth and Quiz face. I picked this up because I thought it would be a good comp title for my own middle grade fantasy project, and I wasn’t disappointed. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the sequel this month.

And that’s it for January. If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to know what you think of them.

Oathbringer Review

Cover of Oathbringer by Brandon SandersonThe first book I read in October was Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. This is the third book in The Stormlight Archive series, which I started last spring. I actually started reading this book in August after the bar, but it was so long and so much was going on in my life that it took me until the beginning of October to finish it.

Again, this is the third book in a series, so I can’t promise there won’t be spoilers for the first two books. If you’re new to The Stormlight Archives series, go check out my review for The Way of Kings, and if you’re not caught up on the series, you can read my reviews for Words of Radiance and the novella that comes between Words of Radiance and Oathbringer, Edgedancer.

Oathbringer starts up directly after the end of Words of Radiance. Again, it follows Kaladin, Shallan, Dalinar, and everybody else we’ve come to know and love in this world. In as much as you can say that any one of these books has a main character as its focus, Kaladin is the main character of The Way of Kings, Shallan is the main character of Words of Radiance, and Dalinar is the main character of Oathbringer. So we get a lot of his backstory and finally learn what he asked the Nightwatcher to take from him when he visited her. It’s horrifying. In the present, Dalinar is trying to unite the ravaged countries of the world to fight against the voidbringers, who have taken Alethkar and many other countries. It doesn’t go so well. Meanwhile, Kaladin has gone to find his family, and along the way he discovers the former Parshmen turned voidbringers may have some legitimate grievances. Shallan, on the other hand, is really struggling with some serious PTSD that manifests as her trying to be anyone but herself–since she can create illusions, she does this literally.

I really liked this book, but there were a few major things that kept me from loving it as much as I loved The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and Edgedancer. I’m going to start with those, and then I’m going to gush.

This book started slowly. Part of the reason it took me so long to get through. I’d say the first quarter to a third of it dragged much more than the other books. I also felt less attached to Dalinar than I did to Kaladin and Shallan, so I had a hard time with him being the focus. This definitely changed over the course of the book, but it weighed me down in the beginning.

That love triangle that was hinted at in Words of Radiance took shape in this book. As I feared, it was a disappointment, but not for the reasons I thought it would be. I normally hate love triangles because they feel like drama for the sake of drama, and they take up too much time in the plot. This love triangle didn’t feel developed enough to matter. Like I didn’t realize that this was the love triangle until it came to a head in a conversation between Shallan and Adolin at the end of the book. Like Shallan’s only sign of interest in Kaladin was in weird looks. Granted I don’t have a lot of experience in flirting so maybe a lot went over my head. As it was, I just felt like the love triangle was shoved in there for the sake of having a love triangle—it felt neither natural nor necessary—and the resolution was rushed and annoying.

Finally, there were a ton of point of view characters in this book, like a ton more than even the previous books, and at important scenes, like the final battle, it became a bit hectic and hard to follow, especially since a bunch of new characters were introduced during the final battle.

But given the size and complexity of this book, these are really minor complaints. The plot of Oathbringer is brilliant and intricate. There are some amazing battle scenes, and some awesome political intrigue. And oh the character development! Dalinar’s character development is amazing, but there’s also great character development from Shallan, Adolin, Elhokar, Jasnah, Renarin, Kaladin, and even the voidbringers. Like great character development. And as much as I complained about the beginning dragging, this book pulled me in at about the one third mark and I finished in about three days, which is a lot given that the second two thirds was about thirty-five hours long (I was listening to the audiobook).

This book was a wild ride, and I loved almost every minute of it. The parts that I didn’t love were more like mildly annoying than bad. I feel like reading this series has opened whole new horizons of reading for me, because now I’m not nearly as daunted by larger fantasy books as I once was. I am dying for the fourth book to come out. I read that Sanderson is estimating 2020? I’m really hoping that’s right.

In the meantime, what other epic fantasy series should I try? Wheel of Time? Game of Thrones? Something I haven’t heard of? And if you’ve read The Stormlight Archives I’d love to discuss.

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 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.