Matt

I don't know if I've soured on Sanderson or what, but Isles of the Emberdark left me frustrated in ways I didn't expect from the author of Mistborn and The Way of Kings. The prose delivers a colonialism message with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and most of the cast are thin archetypes rather than characters. The villain especially reads like he wandered in from a Saturday morning cartoon. Dusk is the one exception, the only character that has any actual growth over the course of the novel, his storyline carries the book. The underlying concept is genuinely interesting, which makes it all the more disappointing when the story wraps up like a Marvel movie: everyone gets what they want and the antagonist is neatly punished. The magic system is cool, but cool scaffolding doesn't save a hollow building.

DNF

DNF