Steelheart

This blurb was enough to get me excited about this book:

Ten years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics.

But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his will.

Nobody fights the Epics . . . nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.

Steelheart

Steelheart

So this was my second Brandon Sanderson book, and I would love to compare it to The Final Empire, but I find that I cannot. The Final Empire is a completely different beast. Truly the only similarities are the author and the nonstop action. It does not take long at all to get into this book, right from the start you are thrown into the battle against the Epics and the story of David and the Reckoners.

The cast of characters in this book is great. Each one had their own quirks and abilities that added to the team. Together, their created this epic group that I loved reading about. To me the characters are what really made this book so great to me. While I loved the plot and the premise, I really enjoyed the characters and their stories. David is a great main character. He is nerdy (but not really), impulsive, dedicated, and inventive. It really was the heart of the team and kept everyone hopeful that they would succeed.

This book had a lot of twists and turns that I was not expecting and that kept me glued to the pages. This book also was had a very nice conclusion to it. It still left me wanting to know what happens after, but there was a sense of resolution following the book's events.

Overall, this is a fantastic fantasy book about your anti-heroes and it was written extremely well. Brandon Sanderson has a way with words and crafting stories and characters that leaves you satisfied but still wanting more. I cannot wait to pick up Firefight and see what David and crew are up to next. Especially with that title and knowing what we know at the end of the book.

There's this hype about Brandon Sanderson that I haven't been able to escape. And, unable to get myself a copy of the Mistborn trilogy, I decided to read Steelheart to know what the fuss is about.

For the first good chunk of this book, Steelheart wasn't anything special to me. My favorite book, Vicious, has superheros gone evil and, to me, nothing will ever compare to Vicious, so Brandon Sanderson's take in it wasn't going to be anything special.

There were things I was enjoying though. I truly loved many of the characters and the overall plot. I think my favorite thing was David's inability to tell a good metaphor.

Them the ending happened, and now I understand the hype of Brandon Sanderson. I'm usually good at picking up hints throughout books and predicting the supposedly non obvious plots. This book was not the case. The ending truly had be surprised, even though Sanderson practically told you what was going to happen multiple times throughout the novel.

Not as deep a world at Mistborn or The Stormlight Archives, but Steelheart starts what promises to be an interesting world, filled with villains and heroes. Unlike the Marvel and DC worlds, heroes in this world are general mortal, while villains have unexpected powers which defy physics. With each power also comes a weakness, which can be used to bring them down. For being as short as this was (half the length of Mistborn), it had an impressive story arc. I'm looking forward to seeing where this series goes.