I really did want to love this book. Sanderson is the golden child of the online fantasy book community. It has some wonderful ideas, an interesting magic system, and an interesting world. The pacing and structure was also pretty good, despite a couple of slow sections.
The writing style, however, just does not land for me. I've thought about this a lot, and my conclusion is that Mistborn just...lacked a voice. It was very clear, and easy to understand what was going on, but the prose just did not hold my interest. By the end of the book it felt like a slog, and not even because of the pacing - I recall the last hundred pages being full of action and satisfying plot payoffs, which was beautifully structured. But the spare prose without a sense of authorial voice just does not tickle my brain in the right way.
This is perhaps controversial, but it was also a bit..."YA" for me? I'm in my forties, and just don't connect with the tropes of "young adult" or "new adult" fiction the way I might have when I was younger.
After reading Mistborn and realizing that the prose was the problem for me, I went in search of something more to my tastes and landed on "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke. It was a breath of fresh air, which I devoured. And not even because of the prose *per se*, which I wouldn't call purple in any sense - but because it has a strong, distinct voice that reflected the character and his world extremely well.
I put aside the Mistborn series, and I'm still trying some of Sanderson's later fiction ("Way of Kings"), which I'm told is better. So far it is an improvement, but we'll see. My attention, however, still drifts to books on my to-read list like "Gormenghast" and "This Is How You Lose The Time War". Maybe I'm just not a Sanderson-stan, and maybe that's okay.
6 Books
See all
