The book that got me back into reading as an adult.. What can I say about this book... great characters.. great story.. fun action.. It's your next favorite heist book.

4.8/5 ( )

What a relief this book was. I read Brandon Sanderson's first book, Elantris, back in Alaska and I thought it was pretty amateurish. When I heard he was the author that would be finishing Robert Jordan's last Wheel of Time novel, I got worried. Luckily, with Mistborn: The Final Empire, he has laid my fears to rest.

Here is an example of his ability to write a complex world with an intricate magical system, more than a handful of characters working on several plot lines at once, and not drop the ball with a deus ex machina. I've already picked up book two and will most likely finish it soon. ( )

4.5 Stars

I liked this book very much especially the ending. No one has to teach how to write a wonderful ending to Brandon Sanderson. The man was a beast at that and to think of all the clues and hints he gave from the start is masterful.

Maybe because of all the high praises for this book and a huge hype behind this series, i didn't find this book enough to give a 5 star rating. (Not to mention that it is very hard to get a 5 star from me) This book will remain one of my favourite books ever but a 4.5 star rating for now. Maybe i will change my mind in the future.

Hope the second book also will be excellent as this. ( )

I read this because I enjoyed Elantris and his Reckoners trilogy. However, I won't be joining those who include this series in their Best Fantasy of All Time lists. It's serviceable enough, and there was no question of not finishing, but I had minor problems with the plot, and large ones with the world-building and pacing.

I thought the characters were reasonable. Vin is three-dimensional and definitely engaging. You can't help but like her/feel for her. Kelsier is slightly less well-drawn but still fine. I didn't like him as a person, but that's not a negative as far as the story goes; it's okay to dislike characters. The rest of the cast are shallow stock figures from fantasy, but since the story is definitely focused on Vin and Kelsier, this didn't detract too much. The romance is utterly tepid.

As I said, I had minor quibbles with the plot. It suffers from the same thing that so many thrillers suffer from: too many artificial situations brought about by characters doing/not doing things a real person would. I was able to overlook it, but it did require occasional moments of suspending disbelief.

On to world-building. I had to suspend disbelief over the political situation and over the economics of the world. However, in a fantasy novel, a good magic system can overcome a multitude of other problems. Unfortunately, I would call "BS" on those who say Sanderson creates well-thought-out magic systems. These were hodge-podges of ideas thrown together. Here's why I think that:

It comes across as a bad idea to go on and on about alloy/non-alloy pairs, about the necessity of specific alloy purities, about burning trace elements because you draw the reader's attention to the details of metallurgy when you should just wave your hands and say, "It's magic, don't try to understand." He made us want to understand.

So, in allomancy, elemental metals like zinc, iron, copper, gold, and tin provide specific abilities when you burn them, as do alloys of those metals. Okay so far. What about the other elemental metals? I mean, maybe aluminum and nickel can be excused because they rarely occur in a pure form in nature, but what about silver or lead? Somebody would have tried them. What are their abilities? And there are naturally occurring alloys like electrum (gold+silver)—their properties would be common knowledge among allomancers, too.

"No, only certain metals are allomantic!" someone says.

Hmm, seems exceedingly odd and inconsistent, but okay. However, there's more.

Copper is the mental metal that hides your use of allomancy. Zinc is the mental metal that allows you to increase others' emotions. If you mix 1/3 zinc into 2/3 copper to create brass, you flip zinc's abilities and can dampen emotions instead of increase them. But since there's far more copper in brass than zinc, you're mostly burning copper atoms. Therefore, wouldn't the effect be fundamentally tied to copper's abilities rather than zinc's?

No? Okay, but that's not the weirdest thing.

If you want to flip copper's mental abilities in a similar fashion, you'd mix in the mental metal of ... umm, wait, no, you add some of a physical metal, tin. Huh? And if you want to flip iron's, you mix in a non-allomantic element (carbon to make steel).

The impression is that he had a list of metals he'd heard of and another list of spells he wanted in this world, so he just matched them up. That comes across as lazy when a little thought could have devised a "system" for metals that made sense and, in fact, could have been much richer. Or explain nothing (thereby removing tons of redundant pages) and say, "It's magic."

And don't even get me started on feruchemy, another magic system in the book. Let me just boil all the inconsistencies in it down to a single question. The premise of this magic is that you have to give up a certain ability (e.g., strength) for a time so you store it. Later, you can retrieve it and apply it on top of your natural ability (e.g., becoming twice as strong) for the same amount of time. So, explain storing memories to me. Do you have to forget them to store them? Sazed didn't.

I might have overlooked all of the above if the book was paced well, but it wasn't. As my wife, who is continuing with the series, admits, "He spends far too much time on things we don't care about and too little time on the stuff we do." We get lengthy, redundant descriptions of this, that, and the other thing, but the central conflict—the Lord Ruler—is over in the blink of an eye. Too many things were drawn out for 500+ pages, then disappeared in a puff of prose smoke: Vin's father, the Inquisitor relentlessly hunting her, etc.

Finally, one last note that applies only to the audio version (I listened to this on a long drive). Sanderson does not follow the advice of editors or authors like Stephen King. He puts a dialogue tag on copious sentences that don't require them, often with an accompanying adverb. In a written book, your eye would skip over these. When listening, the flow of dialogue is broken constantly by sentence after sentence ending with "Vin said," "Kelsier said," "Vin said," "Kelsier said," and on and on.

Unlike my wife, I won't be continuing with the series even though there are so many unanswered questions. There was just no excitement. ( )

I tried this as my first experiment with Brandon Sanderson, having read nothing of his before, and I found it readable and mildly entertaining, but far too long, and rather cold throughout. On finishing it, I don’t feel motivated to read the sequels.

In fantasy, I like a hard magic system, which functions according to known rules and limitations; and here we have a hard magic system. However, this magic system has little in common with traditional magic: it doesn’t feel like magic as I know it from other stories. It seems more related to superhero stories from 20th century comics, in which particular people have special powers. I repeat: there is something cold about it.

On first reading, the story is not bad, but I have some problems with it.

1. I don’t believe the scenario. The author just asserts it without doing anything to make me believe in it. What is the Deepness? How did the Ruler come to be the Ruler? After reading through the whole over-long book, I still don’t know, and I don’t really care. To hell with it. I can go away and read something else.

2. Characterization is good enough, it’s not bad, and yet it’s fairly superficial. I don’t care very much about any of these people. I quite like Vin, the heroine, but even she isn’t enough to persuade me to read more books in the series. The whole situation strikes me as unreal.

3. The story drags. I plodded through it reluctantly, wishing for it to end sooner. It’s an unusually long novel, but I have a few other novels in my collection of similar length, and they don’t drag quite so much. A novel shouldn’t normally be this long, it’s an excessive length, but occasionally a novel may have enough story in it to justify the length. This one hasn’t. I kept wishing for it to get to the point and finish. Thank God it’s over at last.

4. The way people keep gaining strength by gulping doses of liquid-with-metal reminds me irresistibly of Popeye and his spinach. Did the author think of that, I wonder, or is he too young to remember Popeye?

5. As a man, I have no claim to be a feminist, but I suspect that the last sentence of this novel will not appeal to feminists. If you read through all the pages, you’ll get there in the end. ( )