Mistborn: Brandon Sanderson
These books were like a rollercoaster. I started yelling near the end ("WHAT!! WHAT!!") I also read them one after another so I'm not going to even try to do a book-by-book review, just a giant one for all three books. And the review kind of exploded on me. It's really long.
SO! These books!
They're all 500-700 pages by my e-reader and oh my god, I haven't had this level of can't-put-it-down for such a long time. They were magnetic.
The first book follows Vin, a young skaa thief who is attached to a crew scaming noblemen and obligators. In Luthadel, the capital, the skaa live and work in terrible conditions, subjugated by the nobility and the Lord Ruler. Vin has survived thus far because she makes herself small and unnoticed, but also because the crew leaders have--consciously or unconsciously--picked up on her ability to make scams go better when she's around.
When she meets Kelsier, a man bent on creating a skaa rebellion, she finds out what that ability is Allomancy. She's a Mistborn, someone who can ingest different types of metal and then burn them to increase herstrength, see better, affect others' emotions, telekinetically pull and push metal, etc. Mistings--who can burn one type of metal--are fairly rare, and Mistborn, who can burn all ten, even rarer. Kelsier introduces her to his crew and starts training her both in Allomancy and to infiltrate the nobility.
Their rebellion is operated directly under the noses of the Lord Ruler, and there is the ever-present danger of his Inquisitors and the Steel Ministry. Supernaturally powerful and fast, they are the priests of the Lord Ruler and seek out and kill half-skaa Allomancers. There are the obligators, who witness every transaction of the nobility and are the bureaucracy of the Lord Ruler. And there is the power of the nobility, who "rent" the skaa for plantation work but essentially act as the owners of skaa.
The Final Empire
The Final Empire is a fairly straightforward "the rebels defeat evil empire" book, although of course a very enjoyable one. Vin was easily sympathetic, and since Sanderson opens with a prologue where a noble plantation owner has a skaa killed on whim for not working hard enough, the good and bad side are solidly established early. Much of the Lord Ruler and the Inquisitors' natures are kept secret for a long time, and the Inquisitors in particular freaked me out. They've got metal spikes driven through their eyeballs but they can still sense you just as easily, more easily.
Kelsier's crew is a mix of different people: there is Sazed, a Keeper whose life's work is to collect and pass down history and knowledge; Dockson, the logistician; Ham, the Pewterarm (muscle) who enjoys springing philosophical questions on people; Breeze, the Soother who argues with Ham; Clubs, who hides them; and his nephew, Spook, a Tineye. With the exception of maybe Kelsier, they're all sort of two-layered characters, mostly twists. Clubs is very gruff but is a good general that cares for his troops, Ham the muscle and the philosopher, Dockson meticulous with plans holding down the little things but also a plantation skaa who definitely has resentment. I hesitate to call them flat characters, but it's like Sanderson went one further step past one-note into two-note. I like them, don't get me wrong. But over three books of this length it is a little disappointing that the crew still felt so flat.
The Well of Ascension
This book is about the aftermath of destroying evil: setting up a new empire, running a new empire that tries to right the wrongs created by the Lord Ruler. Elend has turned from House Venture and is crowned king, and he tries in his way to put into practice all the political theory he's read. Instead of the dictatorship Elend sets up a parliament with the power to vote out its king--which they do, because Luthadel is being besieged simultaneously by two armies, and Elend doesn't want to surrender.
It's cool because a lot of books have the plot of The Final Empire (the empire must fall! Rebels, etc) and then it ends there. The messy part of making sure that the new government doesn't slip into the old one's way of doing things is often not addressed because the story just ends at the death of the old emperor. This is definitely a book about the messy side of governing, especially for Elend, who discovers that he can't be an effective emperor--they keep the emperor role--in this kind of situation. He can't use his idealism and he needs to act differently. The diffidence he had as the slightly rebellious, noble son of a powerful house just can't hold Luthadel together, not under that sort of pressure.
I also liked how more information came out about Sazed and the Terris people, when Tindwyl shows up. The Siege seemed rather impossible, but more interesting was the political struggle. I particularly enjoyed Elend's change. He's sheltered because of his nobility but he ends up having to confront his father, who embodies all that was wrong with the previous regime. There's a dark mirror to him that Zane represents.
The Hero of Ages
Final novel, where the world itself is destroying them. The ashfalls are choking the air, preventing all but the central part of the country's crops from receiving enough sunlight. The mists are still killing people randomly, if they venture out at night. While Elend and Vin have control over the political situation in Luthadel and the Central Dominance, political concerns are secondary to the problem that humans might not be able to survive at all on the world soon.
Again the focus shifts from political to saving the world/universe, except with somewhat more science. No sunlight equals no food, even though many of the plants are adapted to the reduced sunlight from a thousand years of ashfalls. It also introduces the character Ruin, the antagonist who is appropriately scaled up. Ruin's a god, the opponent of Preservation, and they've been battling for thousands of years. Vin and Elend, together with Cett and their newly acquired koloss armies, are trying to track down the caches left by the Lord Ruler in his various cities, hoping that there is a clue somewhere that will let the empire survive. They are plagued by problems like the mists killing people and the resistance left behind: when they arrive at one of the critical cities, they find that it is being tightly controlled by Yomen, an obligator under the old regime.
The narrative splits into a few different viewpoints. There is Spook, who is trying to escape some of the shame and anger he has towards himself after the siege, which he missed; Spook is in Urteau keeping a watch and spying. tenSoon has returned to his homeland to receive his trial and punishment. Vin and Elend have to separate because Luthadel, in their absence, is falling apart.
I thought the ending was a little regressive (more later). It was interesting, though, to see that the ultimate Hero of Ages was not any of the above options explored through the books. In a lot of ways I think choosing the scholar was a bookish thing to do--part of the whole veneration of learning thing. But I am really, really, really glad that the ending was happy. I can't take the endless grind of unhappiness anymore. There is certainly some closing to the character arcs too. Elend and Vin are happy together, even under all the pressure. Vin comes to accept the two sides of herself she has struggled with since the first book--the street urchin and the woman who likes to move through society. Sazed makes peace with his religions, and finds a true one. It looks like Spook is kind of the new generation--and one with the full powers of the Mistborn, too.
The books in general
The books were simultaneously rough and sophisticated. In each there was a twist that took me by surprise. In the first book, it was Rashek being the one who took the power instead of Alendi. In the second, that the throwaway clue about things not written in metal weren't to be trusted, and then discovering that the words had been changed. In the final about everything fitting together. A lot of things I thought were retcons were neatly wrapped into the ending. I think I'm a fairly good reader and I pick up on a lot of stuff fast (I can see a romance coming from a thousand light years off, I'm telling you) but it's always possible it's just me missing things. The Alendi journal is overturned twice. First you think he's the Hero of Ages, then you think Rashek killed him to get the power for himself, then it's revealed Rashek was instructed to make sure Alendi never got the power, then that the power was malevolent, then then then...
I also yelled at the end because Elend was beheaded and therefore thoroughly dead, but that's because I got attached. That Vin and Elend would die was a not-unexpected conclusion, but I really wanted both of them to live.
However, on the other hand, I think these were one of his earliest books, and it shows. The third book, in particular, felt like a long, long retcon of a lot of what had been said in the first book. In the first book (The Final Empire) the Lord Ruler is a despot, a dictator of the highest order--not just politically but in morally too, inhumanely cruel, so powerful skaa regard him as divinity, utterly irredeemable. He publicly slaughters skaa by the hundreds as demonstrations, for god's sake, and forces everyone in Luthadel to watch. The framing device of Alendi's journal entries, where he questions his role as Hero of the Ages, makes the Lord Ruler's eventual actions seem like a textbook case of power corrupting absolutely. Kelsier martyrs himself to give the crew a chance, a push to kill the Lord Ruler. And since the book is about Vin learning to trust people and live in a new way, emphasizing the difference between Kelsier's crew and other groups as one of trust and simple goodness, their battle against the Lord Ruler is clearly good vs bad.
But the third book turns that on its head. It basically says that the Lord Ruler was right--perhaps not right to kill all those people, but that he tried to do his best in the interests of his people. That he set up the storage caches as not only protection, but because he was farsighted, prudent, etc, all personality traits that are generally associated with protagonists. Increasingly the view of the Lord Ruler is someone who just did his best; the reason that the climate is changed is because when Rashek first touched the Well of Ascension's power, he tried to correct a problem with the earth's climate, and had to move the earth closer to the sun, but that caused bigger problems, so he added ash and changed the plants. Then he is further retconned because apparently Rashek had been trying to do good, but was being influenced by Ruin steadily through the centuries.
I suppose it comes down to what I prefer. I admit that the retcon is a very Doyalist explanation; the very straightforwardness of the first book (with its delineations of good/evil pretty clear, except near the end with Elend) contrasting sharply with the later books, where everyone has good/evil. Some oppose Elend and Vin because they believe in different things (eg Penrod over what to do with the besieging armies, Yomen about what good leadership is and the divinity of the Lord Ruler), some are just plain desperate (Jastes and his koloss army), some are being controlled by Ruin (the leader of Urtreau, Zane who is additionally under pressure from Straff.) I think Straff is among the few truly "bad" characters. To me, the first and third books seem to be saying very different things, and to me that inconsistency makes me think not competent, instead of a more layered message.
The in-universe, Watsonian explanation is provided, and it's the presence of Ruin. To be fair to Sanderson, he does do a little foreshadowing (if you go with the Ruin explanation), even in the first book--at the very beginning. I'd assumed that Vin's ability to detect metals being burned, even though they were shielded and no one else could do it, was just an offshoot of the convention whereby protagonists have more power. But it's explained by clues laid down before, which was an awesome twist; she'd been spiked (and thus gained the powers of) her sister. Same with the ability of the Inquisitors. Instead of having unknown powers to pierce copperclouds, their spiking must give them the similarly high power.
Like a lot of fantasy, this book looks to the past. Prophecies are important and contain knowledge of the future and Keepers (and I sympathize and support them) are tasked with storing every bit of knowledge to pass down. But it's the conclusion that really cements it. To fix the world, Sazed pushes the world back to its old place, then restores all of the animal and plants' physiology to how they were a thousand years ago (turning green, etc) and then wiping all the current geography and cities and putting those back too. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, just a big trend in fantasy. I think Sazed's choice to get rid of destroyed cities Fadex, Luthadel, etc is also signalled early on. Kelsier is single-mindedly focused on destroying the Lord Ruler, who has destroyed everything in Kelsier's life, but he also carries around the picture of a flower that his wife copied, as a symbol of what she was fighting for. Post-Rashek earth has brown vegetation and now flowers (biological reproduction of fauna is not addressed), so Sazed putting them back in is making that circle complete. Still, like a lot of fantasy, it is very retrospective, even with the impetus--Kelsier--being a fight for a better future.
As well, while I thought he did a good job of setting up all the little things, I found that the treatment of the big, thematic issues simplistic. The third book is the heaviest on this, of course, because the world is ending. Ruin & Preservation, and that the world cannot be in balance without both of them together; that's a really common theme. Not much new is done here; they have to be alloyed together to allow the world to be in balance.
A lot of the themes were interesting though. There's a lot about servitude, freedom, survival. Vin is the most obvious example; she tried to be unobtrusive but useful to survive, but her journey in The Final Empire is essentially one of discovering ways to trust, live otherwise. The kandra are similar, though. They tried to assume human forms and were killed by men, so they signed Contracts with men that made them nothing more than perfect servants, unable to kill humans, utterly subservient to their masters. Then there are the Terrismen and women, who have been bred by the Lord Ruler to be docile and serve as stewards. And all of them end up rebelling. Kelsier's message is hope. The skaa have so little chance of actually succeeding, everyone thinks Kelsier is insane, but he's doing it not necessarily to topple the Lord Ruler (though that's his goal) but if he fails, to have shown to the future skaa that rebellion is possible. Give the next generation something to look at. There's the underlying idea that they can't go on this way. Even if rebellion will end in horrible painful death, it's better than staying under the boot. In a lot of ways, the kandra pulling out their spikes, returning to non-sapient mistwraiths, is about getting out of servitude. Not only have they fulfilled their last contracts but they are denying Ruin another tool, a potentially disastrous one, since they know where the atium is hidden.
Oh! Another twist: the koloss! Should have guessed that there would be humans buried in there.
The magic system. It's very well set up generally; he doesn't contradict what Pushes and Pulls can do, though there are six more elements that can be burned than are initially described. That has a reason since the Lord Ruler doesn't want them to be known. But the thing is, though the magic bit was put together well enough, it was fantastically boring to read about. The magic was used almost exclusively to fight. I still don't know whether steel pushes or whether it's iron, even though every book is jam packed with fighting; every time Sanderson said "Pull" or "Push" I just mentally substituted "blah blah FIGHTING" and went on. I don't know how many people have made it this far into my many tl;dr reviews but I really, really love magic worldbuilding and say so at the least opportunity, so it was pretty unusual for me to not care for or look into the magic. The Terris Keepers' powers was more interesting, as was the Contract and abilities of the kandra.
Language! It made me wince but I must give points to Sanderson for the accents; instead of the usual phoenetic rewriting, Eastern street slang that Spook spoke was different because of syntax. That's new! I'm still not a fan of accents but it was at least different.
They were really good books. But I'm going to go read a nice, relaxing, fluffy novel next.
Crosspost: http://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159327.html.
SO! These books!
They're all 500-700 pages by my e-reader and oh my god, I haven't had this level of can't-put-it-down for such a long time. They were magnetic.
The first book follows Vin, a young skaa thief who is attached to a crew scaming noblemen and obligators. In Luthadel, the capital, the skaa live and work in terrible conditions, subjugated by the nobility and the Lord Ruler. Vin has survived thus far because she makes herself small and unnoticed, but also because the crew leaders have--consciously or unconsciously--picked up on her ability to make scams go better when she's around.
When she meets Kelsier, a man bent on creating a skaa rebellion, she finds out what that ability is Allomancy. She's a Mistborn, someone who can ingest different types of metal and then burn them to increase herstrength, see better, affect others' emotions, telekinetically pull and push metal, etc. Mistings--who can burn one type of metal--are fairly rare, and Mistborn, who can burn all ten, even rarer. Kelsier introduces her to his crew and starts training her both in Allomancy and to infiltrate the nobility.
Their rebellion is operated directly under the noses of the Lord Ruler, and there is the ever-present danger of his Inquisitors and the Steel Ministry. Supernaturally powerful and fast, they are the priests of the Lord Ruler and seek out and kill half-skaa Allomancers. There are the obligators, who witness every transaction of the nobility and are the bureaucracy of the Lord Ruler. And there is the power of the nobility, who "rent" the skaa for plantation work but essentially act as the owners of skaa.
The Final Empire
The Final Empire is a fairly straightforward "the rebels defeat evil empire" book, although of course a very enjoyable one. Vin was easily sympathetic, and since Sanderson opens with a prologue where a noble plantation owner has a skaa killed on whim for not working hard enough, the good and bad side are solidly established early. Much of the Lord Ruler and the Inquisitors' natures are kept secret for a long time, and the Inquisitors in particular freaked me out. They've got metal spikes driven through their eyeballs but they can still sense you just as easily, more easily.
Kelsier's crew is a mix of different people: there is Sazed, a Keeper whose life's work is to collect and pass down history and knowledge; Dockson, the logistician; Ham, the Pewterarm (muscle) who enjoys springing philosophical questions on people; Breeze, the Soother who argues with Ham; Clubs, who hides them; and his nephew, Spook, a Tineye. With the exception of maybe Kelsier, they're all sort of two-layered characters, mostly twists. Clubs is very gruff but is a good general that cares for his troops, Ham the muscle and the philosopher, Dockson meticulous with plans holding down the little things but also a plantation skaa who definitely has resentment. I hesitate to call them flat characters, but it's like Sanderson went one further step past one-note into two-note. I like them, don't get me wrong. But over three books of this length it is a little disappointing that the crew still felt so flat.
The Well of Ascension
This book is about the aftermath of destroying evil: setting up a new empire, running a new empire that tries to right the wrongs created by the Lord Ruler. Elend has turned from House Venture and is crowned king, and he tries in his way to put into practice all the political theory he's read. Instead of the dictatorship Elend sets up a parliament with the power to vote out its king--which they do, because Luthadel is being besieged simultaneously by two armies, and Elend doesn't want to surrender.
It's cool because a lot of books have the plot of The Final Empire (the empire must fall! Rebels, etc) and then it ends there. The messy part of making sure that the new government doesn't slip into the old one's way of doing things is often not addressed because the story just ends at the death of the old emperor. This is definitely a book about the messy side of governing, especially for Elend, who discovers that he can't be an effective emperor--they keep the emperor role--in this kind of situation. He can't use his idealism and he needs to act differently. The diffidence he had as the slightly rebellious, noble son of a powerful house just can't hold Luthadel together, not under that sort of pressure.
I also liked how more information came out about Sazed and the Terris people, when Tindwyl shows up. The Siege seemed rather impossible, but more interesting was the political struggle. I particularly enjoyed Elend's change. He's sheltered because of his nobility but he ends up having to confront his father, who embodies all that was wrong with the previous regime. There's a dark mirror to him that Zane represents.
The Hero of Ages
Final novel, where the world itself is destroying them. The ashfalls are choking the air, preventing all but the central part of the country's crops from receiving enough sunlight. The mists are still killing people randomly, if they venture out at night. While Elend and Vin have control over the political situation in Luthadel and the Central Dominance, political concerns are secondary to the problem that humans might not be able to survive at all on the world soon.
Again the focus shifts from political to saving the world/universe, except with somewhat more science. No sunlight equals no food, even though many of the plants are adapted to the reduced sunlight from a thousand years of ashfalls. It also introduces the character Ruin, the antagonist who is appropriately scaled up. Ruin's a god, the opponent of Preservation, and they've been battling for thousands of years. Vin and Elend, together with Cett and their newly acquired koloss armies, are trying to track down the caches left by the Lord Ruler in his various cities, hoping that there is a clue somewhere that will let the empire survive. They are plagued by problems like the mists killing people and the resistance left behind: when they arrive at one of the critical cities, they find that it is being tightly controlled by Yomen, an obligator under the old regime.
The narrative splits into a few different viewpoints. There is Spook, who is trying to escape some of the shame and anger he has towards himself after the siege, which he missed; Spook is in Urteau keeping a watch and spying. tenSoon has returned to his homeland to receive his trial and punishment. Vin and Elend have to separate because Luthadel, in their absence, is falling apart.
I thought the ending was a little regressive (more later). It was interesting, though, to see that the ultimate Hero of Ages was not any of the above options explored through the books. In a lot of ways I think choosing the scholar was a bookish thing to do--part of the whole veneration of learning thing. But I am really, really, really glad that the ending was happy. I can't take the endless grind of unhappiness anymore. There is certainly some closing to the character arcs too. Elend and Vin are happy together, even under all the pressure. Vin comes to accept the two sides of herself she has struggled with since the first book--the street urchin and the woman who likes to move through society. Sazed makes peace with his religions, and finds a true one. It looks like Spook is kind of the new generation--and one with the full powers of the Mistborn, too.
The books in general
The books were simultaneously rough and sophisticated. In each there was a twist that took me by surprise. In the first book, it was Rashek being the one who took the power instead of Alendi. In the second, that the throwaway clue about things not written in metal weren't to be trusted, and then discovering that the words had been changed. In the final about everything fitting together. A lot of things I thought were retcons were neatly wrapped into the ending. I think I'm a fairly good reader and I pick up on a lot of stuff fast (I can see a romance coming from a thousand light years off, I'm telling you) but it's always possible it's just me missing things. The Alendi journal is overturned twice. First you think he's the Hero of Ages, then you think Rashek killed him to get the power for himself, then it's revealed Rashek was instructed to make sure Alendi never got the power, then that the power was malevolent, then then then...
I also yelled at the end because Elend was beheaded and therefore thoroughly dead, but that's because I got attached. That Vin and Elend would die was a not-unexpected conclusion, but I really wanted both of them to live.
However, on the other hand, I think these were one of his earliest books, and it shows. The third book, in particular, felt like a long, long retcon of a lot of what had been said in the first book. In the first book (The Final Empire) the Lord Ruler is a despot, a dictator of the highest order--not just politically but in morally too, inhumanely cruel, so powerful skaa regard him as divinity, utterly irredeemable. He publicly slaughters skaa by the hundreds as demonstrations, for god's sake, and forces everyone in Luthadel to watch. The framing device of Alendi's journal entries, where he questions his role as Hero of the Ages, makes the Lord Ruler's eventual actions seem like a textbook case of power corrupting absolutely. Kelsier martyrs himself to give the crew a chance, a push to kill the Lord Ruler. And since the book is about Vin learning to trust people and live in a new way, emphasizing the difference between Kelsier's crew and other groups as one of trust and simple goodness, their battle against the Lord Ruler is clearly good vs bad.
But the third book turns that on its head. It basically says that the Lord Ruler was right--perhaps not right to kill all those people, but that he tried to do his best in the interests of his people. That he set up the storage caches as not only protection, but because he was farsighted, prudent, etc, all personality traits that are generally associated with protagonists. Increasingly the view of the Lord Ruler is someone who just did his best; the reason that the climate is changed is because when Rashek first touched the Well of Ascension's power, he tried to correct a problem with the earth's climate, and had to move the earth closer to the sun, but that caused bigger problems, so he added ash and changed the plants. Then he is further retconned because apparently Rashek had been trying to do good, but was being influenced by Ruin steadily through the centuries.
I suppose it comes down to what I prefer. I admit that the retcon is a very Doyalist explanation; the very straightforwardness of the first book (with its delineations of good/evil pretty clear, except near the end with Elend) contrasting sharply with the later books, where everyone has good/evil. Some oppose Elend and Vin because they believe in different things (eg Penrod over what to do with the besieging armies, Yomen about what good leadership is and the divinity of the Lord Ruler), some are just plain desperate (Jastes and his koloss army), some are being controlled by Ruin (the leader of Urtreau, Zane who is additionally under pressure from Straff.) I think Straff is among the few truly "bad" characters. To me, the first and third books seem to be saying very different things, and to me that inconsistency makes me think not competent, instead of a more layered message.
The in-universe, Watsonian explanation is provided, and it's the presence of Ruin. To be fair to Sanderson, he does do a little foreshadowing (if you go with the Ruin explanation), even in the first book--at the very beginning. I'd assumed that Vin's ability to detect metals being burned, even though they were shielded and no one else could do it, was just an offshoot of the convention whereby protagonists have more power. But it's explained by clues laid down before, which was an awesome twist; she'd been spiked (and thus gained the powers of) her sister. Same with the ability of the Inquisitors. Instead of having unknown powers to pierce copperclouds, their spiking must give them the similarly high power.
Like a lot of fantasy, this book looks to the past. Prophecies are important and contain knowledge of the future and Keepers (and I sympathize and support them) are tasked with storing every bit of knowledge to pass down. But it's the conclusion that really cements it. To fix the world, Sazed pushes the world back to its old place, then restores all of the animal and plants' physiology to how they were a thousand years ago (turning green, etc) and then wiping all the current geography and cities and putting those back too. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, just a big trend in fantasy. I think Sazed's choice to get rid of destroyed cities Fadex, Luthadel, etc is also signalled early on. Kelsier is single-mindedly focused on destroying the Lord Ruler, who has destroyed everything in Kelsier's life, but he also carries around the picture of a flower that his wife copied, as a symbol of what she was fighting for. Post-Rashek earth has brown vegetation and now flowers (biological reproduction of fauna is not addressed), so Sazed putting them back in is making that circle complete. Still, like a lot of fantasy, it is very retrospective, even with the impetus--Kelsier--being a fight for a better future.
As well, while I thought he did a good job of setting up all the little things, I found that the treatment of the big, thematic issues simplistic. The third book is the heaviest on this, of course, because the world is ending. Ruin & Preservation, and that the world cannot be in balance without both of them together; that's a really common theme. Not much new is done here; they have to be alloyed together to allow the world to be in balance.
A lot of the themes were interesting though. There's a lot about servitude, freedom, survival. Vin is the most obvious example; she tried to be unobtrusive but useful to survive, but her journey in The Final Empire is essentially one of discovering ways to trust, live otherwise. The kandra are similar, though. They tried to assume human forms and were killed by men, so they signed Contracts with men that made them nothing more than perfect servants, unable to kill humans, utterly subservient to their masters. Then there are the Terrismen and women, who have been bred by the Lord Ruler to be docile and serve as stewards. And all of them end up rebelling. Kelsier's message is hope. The skaa have so little chance of actually succeeding, everyone thinks Kelsier is insane, but he's doing it not necessarily to topple the Lord Ruler (though that's his goal) but if he fails, to have shown to the future skaa that rebellion is possible. Give the next generation something to look at. There's the underlying idea that they can't go on this way. Even if rebellion will end in horrible painful death, it's better than staying under the boot. In a lot of ways, the kandra pulling out their spikes, returning to non-sapient mistwraiths, is about getting out of servitude. Not only have they fulfilled their last contracts but they are denying Ruin another tool, a potentially disastrous one, since they know where the atium is hidden.
Oh! Another twist: the koloss! Should have guessed that there would be humans buried in there.
The magic system. It's very well set up generally; he doesn't contradict what Pushes and Pulls can do, though there are six more elements that can be burned than are initially described. That has a reason since the Lord Ruler doesn't want them to be known. But the thing is, though the magic bit was put together well enough, it was fantastically boring to read about. The magic was used almost exclusively to fight. I still don't know whether steel pushes or whether it's iron, even though every book is jam packed with fighting; every time Sanderson said "Pull" or "Push" I just mentally substituted "blah blah FIGHTING" and went on. I don't know how many people have made it this far into my many tl;dr reviews but I really, really love magic worldbuilding and say so at the least opportunity, so it was pretty unusual for me to not care for or look into the magic. The Terris Keepers' powers was more interesting, as was the Contract and abilities of the kandra.
Language! It made me wince but I must give points to Sanderson for the accents; instead of the usual phoenetic rewriting, Eastern street slang that Spook spoke was different because of syntax. That's new! I'm still not a fan of accents but it was at least different.
They were really good books. But I'm going to go read a nice, relaxing, fluffy novel next.
Crosspost: http://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/159327.html.