Mistborn: The Original Trilogy kicks off with a world where the Dark Lord won a thousand years ago, the world is covered in volcanic ash, and everyone who isn't nobility is a slave. A group of rebels, led by a guy with Magneto-esque metal based powers, attempts an impossible heist to end the tyranny once and for all.
Mistborn feels like it was written for a younger audience than me; an audience who would more readily connect with either of the wish-fulfilment deuteragonists (an implausibly talented girl from the streets and an implausibly badass master thief), and an audience who might not notice the heavy structuring in the book. At any point in the novel, you can see the framework on which this story hangs. We are told from the get go that the heist will probably get all the heroes killed, but within the first few chapters I correctly figured out who exactly would be dead by the end. That's not to say the book is without twists or clever tricks I didn't see coming, or even that its more predictable parts are badly handled, its just that I feel like the story telling is falling behind our expectations, trying to impress us with an all too familiar set up.
That's a shame because the world and actual heist are well done. I liked the originality of the setting, and of the emphasis on court intrigue, spycraft and wetwork. It has a nice bunch of characters too; a poorer writer could have left us with clichéd, edgy, action heroes with billowing night cloaks, one-liners, and akimbo daggers, but thankfully this has been written with considerably more self-awareness. Characters will regularly call out the hero for melodramatic cloak sweeping and affected wise-cracking, and that turns out to be more than enough to keep the lead from falling into a dreaded Mary Sue territory. They aren't effortlessly badass, they are try-hards who need to feel like badasses. They need the pretence to escape the fact that they are largely powerless against the "final empire".
Even if I feel a bit too adult for it at times, I can recommend Mistborn to anyone. It is by the numbers, but Mistborn picked good numbers with an original looking setting and fun characters.
The Final Empire: By The Numbers
Mistborn: The Original Trilogy kicks off with a world where the Dark Lord won a thousand years ago, the world is covered in volcanic ash, and everyone who isn't nobility is a slave. A group of rebels, led by a guy with Magneto-esque metal based powers, attempts an impossible heist to end the tyranny once and for all.
Mistborn feels like it was written for a younger audience than me; an audience who would more readily connect with either of the wish-fulfilment deuteragonists (an implausibly talented girl from the streets and an implausibly badass master thief), and an audience who might not notice the heavy structuring in the book. At any point in the novel, you can see the framework on which this story hangs. We are told from the get go that the heist will probably get all the heroes killed, but within the first few chapters I correctly figured out who exactly would be dead by the end. That's not to say the book is without twists or clever tricks I didn't see coming, or even that its more predictable parts are badly handled, its just that I feel like the story telling is falling behind our expectations, trying to impress us with an all too familiar set up.
That's a shame because the world and actual heist are well done. I liked the originality of the setting, and of the emphasis on court intrigue, spycraft and wetwork. It has a nice bunch of characters too; a poorer writer could have left us with clichéd, edgy, action heroes with billowing night cloaks, one-liners, and akimbo daggers, but thankfully this has been written with considerably more self-awareness. Characters will regularly call out the hero for melodramatic cloak sweeping and affected wise-cracking, and that turns out to be more than enough to keep the lead from falling into a dreaded Mary Sue territory. They aren't effortlessly badass, they are try-hards who need to feel like badasses. They need the pretence to escape the fact that they are largely powerless against the "final empire".
Even if I feel a bit too adult for it at times, I can recommend Mistborn to anyone. It is by the numbers, but Mistborn picked good numbers with an original looking setting and fun characters.