I finally finished Mistborn. As I talked about in my rant back in October, I knew I was going to have a very hard time getting through it because so much of it was just bad.
And I was right.
It’s the end of December right now, and I just finished the book. I will say that I did finally get into the book towards the end. I got a little more attached to the characters (or at least one of them), and the major events that had been teased for the entirety of the novel were finally holding my attention. Kinda.
But this is not a good book. Well, let me be more accurate. This is a well-written book, but the plot is bad. Sanderson can write, and he can write well. But his ability, at least at this point in his career, is lacking. Maybe I’m being too harsh, given that Mistborn was one of his earliest published novels, and I’m comparing it all to Tress of the Emerald Sea, but I can’t help but be very disappointed.
So let’s talk about Mistborn. Spoilers from here on out.
The Ending
It seems odd to start a review by talking about the end of the book first, but this is the part that really bugged me, so we’ll start there.
The Lord Ruler was built up to be this super evil asshole, who ruled with an iron fist, and enslaved half the population. This guy is the guy we were built to hate for the entire book.
The confrontation between the good guys and the bad guy all took place in two chapters. Add on top of all that, the guy who, we thought, would be the guy to kill the bad guy, end up dying without a fight. Literally got his face bitch slapped right off. Kelsier was supposed to be this almighty survivor, a man who could stand up to the Lord Ruler and actually have a chance at winning, and instead he died without putting up a fight at all. More, he supposedly planned it that way.
That’s right, the savior of the people, died so that the people would rise up and start a rebellion that in the end happened mostly off camera and had little impact on the final boss battle.
There’s nothing wrong with a final confrontation taking just a small amount of the book. In fact, most books are that way. But Mistborn fooled us into thinking that what happened during most of the book actually mattered, and it didn’t. The rebel group of thieves raised an army, that army got its ass kicked halfway through the book, and that was that.
It goes back to what I said in the rant I did back in October:
Part of the problem that Mistborn has presented is that the characters are fighting such an uphill battle, and their solution to the ultimate showdown seems idiotic. The entire premise is that they’re going to cause havoc, while training a small army, and then will somehow lure the Empire’s army away and then kill the bad guy. Or steal from the bad guy. Or both. The intentions of the characters are not well laid out.
So much of the book so far has been aimed at this very obscure goal. And none of the things that have happened so far have gotten us any closer to that goal. And that would normally be okay, but the plot just makes no sense.
That feeling held up right to the end of the book. None of the “heists” or plans that the main characters worked toward actually ended up mattering at all. That makes me feel like the entire book was a waste. There is some character development there to be sure, but almost every plot point is somehow negated. The army gets it ass kicked because one of the crew decided to act early. The heists all go wrong because the crew, specifically Kelsier, isn’t as strong as he thinks he is. The government catches on to the schemes of the crew, and then the crew and what’s left of the army has to fight to free some of their members, leading to Kelsier’s unheroic demise.
One thing after the other was a farce. Add on top of all this, the crew itself was useless towards the final ending. Vin, Kelsier’s brother, and Sazed were the only members who mattered in the end. And Marsh, Kel’s brother, was off-screen and assumed dead for most of the book. Hardly any of the magic that we spent tons of time learning about actually played a role at the end. This is mostly because the confrontation with The Lord Ruler was very anti-climactic. Sure, there was a battle, but there was no tension. We all knew that it was going to end, and it did end. And easily, or so it seemed.
Worse, there’s a moment towards the end of the book, where Vin wondered if the Lord Ruler’s death was going to end up being a bad thing. I’ve not read the next book in the series, but it’s obvious that the rest of the series is about whatever the Lord Ruler was “protecting” the world from. And this makes Mistborn feel even more useless.
Characters
I love Vin. She’s the only one that I care about. Elend is okay for a love interest, but he’s also not in the book very much. Vin is the only character in the entire book that has any growth whatsoever. Kelsier is arrogant and ineffective right until the end. I suppose building up your reputation and then dying to make the masses rise up would be an effective plan. If only that up-rising wasn’t completely useless and entirely off-screen. It’s not as if the Lord Ruler and his cronies actually cared about the uprising. The nobility did, but they were ineffective and weren’t going to be there to support the Lord Ruler anyway, he had his own men for that.
What I’m trying to say is that Vin is the only reason I managed to get through the book at all. She’s complex, and she grows so much from the street urchin we see at the beginning. It’s nice, and made me actually feel something about this book that wasn’t boredom.
When it comes to books, I am a very character-driven reader. I often don’t care about the plot. If Mistborn was filled with characters that I cared about, the plot could have been terrible, and I’d be happy with it. Give me a good romance or some conflict, have the characters go on a journey of discovery or get them working towards feats that actually matter, and I will be thrilled with your book.
In Mistborn, I got none of that. I got a cast of characters that are either off-screen most of the time and aren’t around enough for me to learn about, let alone care about, or they’re just useless. NPC characters, as we’d call them in gaming.
Conclusion
I didn’t like this book. And that makes me sad. Brandon Sanderson has a lot of content out there, and he has a huge fan base. They can’t all be wrong, right?
Maybe it’s just me. I talked a lot about expectations in my earlier rant. I talked about how this book had been built up as a heist novel. I expected better with that sort of build up. Those expectations are my fault, not the author’s.
I try to think about this book without those preconceptions, but it’s difficult to do. I think a lot of the character stuff would still be terrible, since heist novel or not, Vin remains the only character that is actually worth a damn at all. If the heists were better, if the plans of the crew had been better, if the final confrontation had been more epic, the characters would probably still be ass.
And that’s what it all comes down to for me, the characters in this book don’t make me care enough to get past the mediocre plot.
What did you think of Mistborn? Please let me know in the comments below.
