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.
Last 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.