Sean

I’d enjoyed the first three Wax and Wayne books, but The Lost Metal really elevates the series, delivering on the set-up work of the first three in a very strong way. The stakes have gotten bigger with each book in the series and this one is back to Cosmere-wide scale. But even with that, it stays grounded in the same lovable characters and their personal motivations and challenges. In particular, Wayne gets a fledged out backstory with real emotional depth that makes the ending hit incredibly hard.

This book was generally informative, but also quite scatterbrained. As someone who actively works with a conservation herd, I wish it had more lessons that could be applied to future bison conservation work. Maybe the problem is that, so far, conserving large herding animals globally has been mostly unsuccessful, but I wish the emphasis had been more on the few things that have gone well rather than the endless train of missteps in the last hundred years.

Books don’t get any more emotional than The Road. The setting itself sets the mood right off the bat with everything coated in ash, not even a sign of life in the forests, and just a long lonely road cutting its way through the gray, post-apocalyptic scenes. Every step of the man and the boy’s journey down the road is full of despair. It really makes you wonder how they keep going. And yet, when I finished the book, I realized that even in the most desolate atmosphere imaginable, the relationship between the man and the boy keeps hope alive and as long as they have each other they simply have to keep going. They’re everything that’s good about the world and somehow made me come away from such a depressing book feeling hopeful.

I have no idea how I hadn’t read Into Thin Air before given how often I read Into The Wild when I was younger, but I’m happy to have rectified that error now. This is such a deeply emotional story. Especially in the last hundred pages, detailing the summit push, I felt like I was living every harrowing step right along with Jon Krakauer as the joy of achieving that dream turned to a literal horror movie. I teared up at multiple points; especially the confusion over Andy Harris’ demise, and Rob Hall talking to his wife on the sat phone while stranded and on the verge of death. This story is the ultimate reminder of how small humans truly are when faced with the power of mother nature and why, no matter how hard we try, it can never be tamed.

Kelsier’s aura remains unmatched. This was just fun to relive era 1 from a very different point of view.

The bands of mourning leveled up era two in a lot of ways. I found myself caring about the characters more deeply, in part because their motivations and insecurities are much more developed. This book also sets up potentially world altering circumstances to come in book four that make it feel more like era 1. Lastly, I’m always a sucker for books where characters travel to new and interesting places and was very happy to see this story move out of Elendel.

I really wanted to love this book, but clearly, since it took me two months to read, something didn’t quite click. The book is written as though you’re in the audience of a play watching the story unfold on stage, with occasional fourth wall breaks. I’d never read something written this way and maybe that played into my struggle with this. Despite the bad rating, I wouldn’t tell someone to stay away from this book. There are a lot of really cool elements to it, particularly in the worldbuilding, and I could see some people finding an instant connection to the story and flying right through it.

Howling Dark takes a major step up from empire of silence in terms of the scope of the world and the relevance to the bigger story. The worlds they visit in this book are wonderfully weird, exploring what it even means to be human in the far future, while still working towards the goal of making contact with the Cielcin. When contact is made eventually, it feels like the true start of this series. The entire negotiation drives home the major differences between humans and Cielcin before culminating in an incredible battle scene that seems like it will have major impact going forward. The concept of The Quiet, this almost supernatural group of beings, is probably my most pressing question going into book 3. They’re clearly pulling some strings and have a vested interest in Hadrians success.

The main reason this book isn’t five stars for me is they skipped an entire book in between 1 and 2. The first 200 pages of Howling Dark are talking about this campaign they’d been on and all the crazy events that happened, but we don’t get to see any of it and so the first part of the book just doesn’t have the impact it should. He clearly wanted to emphasize the found family aspect of the Red Company but didn’t do enough to develop the side characters to make it hit hard. I really hope book 3 continues developing Valka well and adds some more interesting secondary parts.

When an author telegraphs the end of a series in the first chapter of book one, it feels like that ending will inevitably be disappointing. That was not true in this case. Ruocchio sticks the landing gracefully. Shadows Upon Time raised the stakes with every chapter. There was incredible action, political intrigue, and philosophical musings in nearly every chapter. Sun Eater is one of a kind. With this final book it has confirmed its spot in the very upper echelons of all the series I’ve ever read.

Shadows of Self felt a lot more like Mistborn Era 1 than Alloy of Law did, which makes me more excited about where this series is going. I enjoyed the larger scale of the conflict and its ramifications on the world. The characters also bring a more light hearted vibe than most of Sanderson’s books. It’s always a good time when Wayne narrates a chapter.