sci-fibookreviews

Wrapping up the Mistborn trilogy is The Hero of Ages.  Thankfully the final outing is a little shorter than the previous entry, coming in at 724 pages (not including the index and reference sections).

The stakes in this book are dire.  The mists come during the day now, blocking out the sunlight and starving plants.  Even worse than that, they’ve started to kill.  Randomly, people caught out in the them will fall sick and die.  The ashmounts, that once protected the world because of its closeness to the sun, are now overproducing ash.  It piles up everywhere, blanketing the landscape, and choking the rivers.  The world is dying.  It’s up to Vin, Elend, and their companions to try and save it.

I waited so long for this book to come out in paperback so I could finally finish a trilogy that I had enjoyed immensely.  However, when I turned the final page, I was left disappointed.  There were a few things missing from this book.

The character development which had been such a strong point in the previous novels was toned down.  It seemed only Elend really had any sort of development.  And even that was really jut a rehash of what was happening in the previous story.  He struggled with becoming an emperor who might need to make harsh/necessary decisions but also an emperor who still holds on to his ideals.  Same thing as last time.  Finally at the end of the book, it looks like he got it figured out, but 700+ pages of the same inner struggle?  Too much.

This book could have been trimmed a lot more.  Most of the plot is the characters searching out the Lord Ruler’s hidden storage caverns scattered around the empire.  They were believed to hold the keys to humanity’s survival.  But it took the charactes so long to find all of them.  And then it seemed like between every storage cavern they found, I had to endure more and more exposition about how dire the situation was.  How much ash there was everywhere.  How people were starving.  How Ruin was manipulative and one step ahead of everything.  It was so tedious that by the time the final battle happened, I couldn’t truly enjoy it because I just wanted to scream, “Finally!”

A lot of the questions that were raised in the first and second installments were answered and for that I was grateful.  But at the same time, there were questions raised in this book that weren’t answered.  They weren’t simple questions that the author left to leave room for possible sequels.  No these just came across as sloppy.  I actually had to go to the Wikipedia page to find answers.

For example, the Wikipedia page told me that the world they live on is called Scadrial.  I don’t remember that fact being mentioned ever in any of the three novels!  Isn’t that something that might be important?  Also the Wiki tells me that the two warring gods in the novel, Ruin and Preservation, are actually Shards of Adonalsium, “a godlike entity which appears in many of Sanderson’s books.”  Now I remember hearing that word, but it only appeared once!  It appeared in one of the epigraphs that begin each chapter.  Again, I think that this little factoid would have been useful to know.

In the novel, both Ruin and Preservation “die” in a fashion.  They each leave behind a body, one red-haired and one dark-haired.  Nothing more is said about the fact that Gods, entities, left behind phyiscal, human bodies when they died.  The Wiki mentions their names, Ati and Laras.  Why am I having to go to the Wikipedia page to learn about things that should be included in the novel?  Now I know that Sanderson keeps an extensive website filled with backstory and extra information (even deleted scenes and rough drafts of chapters) but why should I have to go to the website to get stuff that should be in the book?  It just felt lazy to me.

Finally, the biggest unanswered question raised in this book comes at the very end.  Sazed leaves behind a note for Spook explaining what has happened.  At the very end of the note Sazed says, “P.S. There are still two metals that nobody knows about.  You might want to poke about and see if you can figure out what they are.  I think they’ll interest you” (Sanderson 724).

That is such a huge cop-out/lead in for a sequel or spin off.  It was blatant and rather disgusting.  It’s almost like Sanderson wrote “The End?” at the end of the novel.  It came across as a brash marketing attempt, much like the necessity of having to checkout his website to get information that should be in the novel.

I was disappointed with this novel.  It just didn’t feel like a fitting end to such a promising trilogy.  There still were Allomantic battles, filled with awesome, but even those weren’t enough to outweigh this novel’s weaknesses.  Read this book just to finish the series, but don’t expect the same level of greatness that permeated the first one.

Score: 3/5

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