Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn

Overall Rating: 5/5 stars
Genre: Fantasy (adult or teen; situationally and language wise it's clean)
Gender Appeal: All
Re-read value: High
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Mistborn-The-Final-Empire-Book/dp/0765350386
Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/68428.Mistborn


To be completely up front with you, I have to admit something. I love just about every book I've read by Brandon Sanderson. I like some better than others; but his knack for leading the reader - and the characters - around like a bull being pulled by a ring in its nose and then tossing them upside down... well, it's just amazing. And it makes it fun to reread the stories, so you can look for hints of what was really going on, how the reader and character were deceived so completely.

Mistborn is the first book in his trilogy, The Final Empire. The beginning of the back blurb on the paperback was what hooked me into buying the book:

"Once, a hero arose to save the world. A young man with a mysterious heritage courageously challenged the darkness that strangled the land.

He failed."

It's so blunt and surprising; the idea of the chosen hero rising up, trying his best, and failing at his quest. The whole premise is handled so ingeniously throughout the book (and the rest of the trilogy), that it almost makes you wonder why heroes always succeed in stories. A story of failure can be just as fascinating.

Of course, part of what makes this story so fascinating is the way that it's told - not through the eyes of the hero as he begins his quest, but a young woman named Vin, who lives in a society that has to deal with the aftermath of this failure a thousand years later.

The Hero of Ages only partially failed in his duty; he lives on as the Lord Ruler, and he rules with an iron fist. Life is terrible for most people. Poverty and oppression run rampant. Into this atmosphere, Vin is born. She discovers shortly into the book that she has what Sanderson terms "Allomantic powers." Allomancy, in the Mistborn universe, is the ability certain individuals have to ingest specific metals and "burn" them, causing various effects. Most people with Allomantic powers can only use a single type of metal; Vin is one of the rarest creatures there is, a full "mistborn" who can burn any allomantic metal. Such beings are extraordinarily dangerous and valuable, and are carefully controlled by the Lord Ruler.

Sanderson's descriptions of Vin flying through the air, pushing and pulling on various metal sources around her (with a careful attention to the laws of physics and motion) were fascinating to me. Sometimes, he can get a little carried away with it, but in this case I think I'd rather have a little bit too much detail than not enough.

Vin is one of my favorite heroines in an adult book. She's incredibly strong, given her mistborn capabilities, yet she's so uncertain of herself. She spent most of her formative years on the street in a thieving crew, trying to avoid beatings and other unwanted physical attention. She's always alert, wary, slow to trust, and yet she isn't crippled by her upbringing. She is able to grow and change throughout the series, and that's a rare occurrence in a novel. Vin is like that underdog sports team that you just can't help rooting for.

Without giving away any major plot points, I'd have to say that Sanderson is amazingly adept at sleight-of-hand. Just when you think you know what direction the plot is going, he yanks it around and turns you on your head. And when you think you finally know how things are going to resolve, he gives you some vital piece of information or a new viewpoint that changes everything. He's great at using the limitations of third person point-of-view to obscure the bigger picture of what's really going on. And while I love a good mystery, and I'm pretty good at solving puzzles, it's even more satisfying to not be able to puzzle things out and be completely surprised - but not because the ending is far-fetched.