Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn: Secret History is a companion story to the original Mistborn trilogy. As such, it contains HUGE SPOILERS for the books Mistborn (The Final Empire), The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages. It also contains very minor spoilers for the book The Bands of Mourning. Mistborn: Secret History builds upon the characterization, events, and worldbuilding of the original trilogy. Reading it without that background will be a confusing process at best. In short, this isn’t the place to start your journey into Mistborn. (Though if you have read the trilogy—but it has been a while—you should be just fine, so long as you remember the characters and the general plot of the books.) Saying anything more here risks revealing too much. Even knowledge of this story’s existence is, in a way, a spoiler. There’s always another secret.

I read this as part of Arcanum Unbounded right after finishing Bands of Mourning.

This is a fun, weird, wild ride back through the original Mistborn trilogy, from a strange and surprising point of view. I think the original Mistborn trilogy stands fine on its own, but Secret History might be required reading to make sense of some parts of Bands of Mourning as well.

The main character is in fantastic form. I had almost forgotten how much I liked this character from the original trilogy.

On one hand I admit that it really didn't feel like Kelsier's story was done after the first book and I was kind of expecting some hints in later novels.

But this is it? This feels like a fan fiction written by the author himself! It completely reveals all the secrets about the Mistborn series and Scadriel in general. I would've prefered to be kept in the dark or at least to think that all of this was the work of Preservation and not Kelsier's.

The Cosmere connections I liked but gutting the original story and “revealing” that all those things Preservation supposedly had done were actually done by Kelsier broke all the magic and mysticism of the series.
I wanted to know more and if the story focused more on the elder ones (or whatever they're called), other travellers and the actual secrets of Cosmere I would've loved this novella. But it doesn't. Instead it focuses on the trilogy and reveals that every important act done to further the plot was actually done in secret by Kelsier and not by Preservation.

And so I can't accept it. I don't want to accept it because it ruins otherwise great and supremely original story and degrades it to the mediocre levels. Maybe I just pictured everything better in my head and this book shattered my image and now I can't accept the mediocrity of it.

However, I admit it got better towards the end but even that's mostly because Vin is probably my favourite female lead character.
Still, though, I wish I've never read this novella.

If Mistborn was a videogame, this novella would be infinite ammo and life cheats :/