After gifting me the Mistborn trilogy in order to get me to read it, my sister then gifted me another novel of the Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker. I guess these take place in the same fantasy universe, but on different planets with different (shudder) "magic systems." (Seriously, has anything ever made magic less magical than the term "magic systems"?)
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Originally published: 2009 Acquired: July 2021 Read: February 2023 |
As I remembering feeling about Mistborn, I felt this had some good ideas and would be solid raw material for a better story. The idea of two sisters that have to switch places is a good one, though I don't think Sanderson is adept enough at characterization to make as much of it as someone else might have. The magic system is a bit too convoluted, and as in Mistborn, too much of the climax comes in the form of revelations about its mechanics... but who cares? Also you can't use CamelCase in a fantasy novel, it's just not right! "BioChroma" is a terrible, immersion-breaking term.
It is cleverly put together, though. I did like the reveal that the comedy rogues who are always telling you how terrible they are are in fact actually terrible—if you've read Sanderson's Mistborn, you expect them to turn out like the criminals in that book, actually nice people at heart, so it's a neat use of his own past work to foil your expectations. I did kind of like the character of the languid god who wants to do more. The sequence where one sister is rendered homeless is pretty harrowing.
But it's all... a bit of a plod, you know? Almost seven hundred pages of small type, and I'm not convinced it needed to be that long, it often feels very repetitive.
Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Elantris
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