The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

The Alloy of Law: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson

Published: 2011
Read: August 2024

Knowing what I know of Brandon Sanderson fans, I suspect this is a minority viewpoint, but this was my favorite Mistborn novel thus far. Set centuries after the original trilogy ("Era 1"), the fourth book takes place in a nineteenth-century kind of setting, with trains and industrialization. Shorn of the need to carefully establish all the rules of allomancy and feruchemy that I quite frankly do not care about and can never be made to care about, the book just gets on with having a fun adventure. 

This one doesn't dive deep into the "lore" of its world, it just focuses on two characters fighting crime together, and their interactions were for me the primary delight of the novel. The mystery itself is pretty so-so (there are basically no suspects, then they figure out who did it), but I always enjoyed reading about Wax and in particular Wayne and what they were up to. For a Sanderson novel, it's quite short (less than half the length of any previous Mistborn novel!) and quite focused. It still has some weird choices (it has rotating third-person narrators, but this isn't clear until about one third of the way in, which means our first jump to a new perspective is quite jarring), and I always feel like Sanderson puts more effort into the magic systems than making the politics and economics of his worlds convincing, but I had a good time here, and if its other books are like this, I will enjoy "Era 2" of Mistborn much more than I did Era 1.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: Shadows of Self