#you know what yes i probably would shag a kandra and you cant stop me

[bakechochin]

Book Reviews - Mistborn: The Bands of Mourning

Mistborn: The Bands of Mourning - Brandon Sanderson - For fuck’s sake fine, I’ll get back on the Mistborn train after a good few aeons of neglecting it -> My relationship with this series is similar to a friendship with a guy called Callum who I know through uni, in that both are great fucking fun in short bursts but the shit they try to pull tests the very boundaries of belief; it has however been just shy of a year since I’ve read any Mistborn books, so I figured I could go into this one with a mind clear of the bitterness I once held for the series - As it turns out, going in to this book fresh was a great idea, as all the good stuff that I liked from the previous books shone in this book, which can’t all be down to my own revitalised interest and therefore must in part be attributable to this book’s high quality -> The action in this book is bloody amazing, continuing to bring all I’d expect from the Mistborn series (i.e. high-intensity and fast paced set pieces, occasionally aboard trains, involving novel uses of radical metal magic), and of course the multiple character perspectives allows for lots of cool action stuff to be going on at the same time -> This of course gives the book a brilliant pace, with all the characters always doing something that will move the plot along; I remember in Shadows of Self, it took almost a hundred pages in for it to be revealed that kandra are back (which was a sizeable bloody portion of that book), but in this book it throws you right into the fray of things and the gang are off on their merry quest before you even know what’s happening - Whilst Alloy of Law was too focused on the industry elements, and Shadows of Self was too intensive with the high magic vibes, this book manages to create a far better balance between the two, with both the industry and the magic existing simultaneously without ridiculously overpowering the other, which made for a much better read - This is something that I have yet to praise the Mistborn series for, especially the Wax and Wayne books, but I absolutely love how the different character perspectives in these books allow to really capture the lives of people of both upper and lower classes, thereby really emphasising the life of the city as a whole (this shines particularly well in this book for that matter, being better able to capture the more ‘fun’ side of working class life as opposed to nothing but grim misery) - The characters continue to be pretty alright; Wax and Wayne are as great as ever and can always elicit a few sensible chuckles from me, Marasi continued to teeter precariously between relevant and irrelevant but was generally pleasant enough, and I was honestly quite glad to see Steris get more of a role in this book as I’ve always been oddly fond of her ridiculously comical stoicism - I am very glad that this book has finally made the Set, who previously seemed like just a bunch of boring businessmen, seem like a credible threat to our protagonist group of overpowered geezers, with some interesting advancements and a few rad twists - The ending to this piqued the everliving fuck out of my interest, and so now I’ve no choice but to wait until The Lost Metal comes out in paperback just to figure out what the fuck is going on - This was equally the case in Shadows of Self, but I really fucking love the inclusion of in-world broadsheet pages in this book; they were great for world building and look seriously fucking cool - Readers of the series may know that last book ended with shit hitting the fan, and I was expecting this to have a bigger impact on the beginning of this book than what the book actually provided; I’m not sure if I prefer the book’s commencing in media res, thereby bypassing what would have most likely been a good few pages of Wax moping and not being an especially engaging protagonist, when I was thinking that the catastrophic events that occurred in the previous book could allow for some interesting character study with Wax - At this point in the series I reckon I can say that Sanderson’s lack of forward planning with the Mistborn books is pretty fucking evident -> Both this book and Shadows of Self do pretty much the same exact thing; introduce some new previously unmentioned element right at the beginning (I mean technically Lessie was mentioned in Alloy of Law, but she was alive for all of twenty pages so she may as well not have been), which will obviously be the entire crux of the characters’ motivations for the book’s events (in the case of this book it’s the inclusion of Wax’s sister, who is, by the way, a pretty shitty character) -> I probably ought to cut Sanderson some slack, since he wrote Alloy of Law as a writing exercise for shits and grins and probably wasn’t anticipating to have to squeeze another three books out of what he set up in that one short book, but I’m still gonna complain about it because it is still a recurring issue that vexes me from book to book - Just as I was getting into this adventure to previously unseen lands that the book was setting up, all of a sudden Sanderson decided to dump a shit load of political exposition on my head, which I cannot say I appreciate (and not even the cool fun times politics from The Well of Ascension, but shit about taxation that is easy enough to get my head around but not stuff that I want to be dedicating reading time to when there’s Allomancy fight scenes to be had) -> There’s even talk amongst the characters along the lines of, ‘I’m sorry for not paying more attention to all the politics malarkey before now, it truly is important’, which seems to me like Sanderson subtly slagging me off for wanting to be exempt from this shit - Whilst I do enjoy seeing the wider world of Scadriel in the Mistborn universe, I can’t help feeling that though hype is built up about each new location, all the new cities seem really unimportant when they’re really just all copy-pastes of one another (same grandiose halls, same shifty nobles, same grubby plebs) and really only exist as the same backdrop for action set pieces with ostensibly raised stakes because they’re in a different location now -> I’m not saying that Sanderson should get rid of the journey aspect altogether, but I just think that more of an effort could have been put into differentiating one city to another - In order to keep the whole ‘friendship happy times’ vibe going with the main cast, Sanderson sacrifices the otherworldly allure that the kandra have; they used to be these mysterious unknowable creatures who wear the faces of humans, but now because all the characters need to banter with one another, all the kandra do is make ‘oh-so-funny’ blasé remarks about how morbid they are, which gets old really fucking quick -> Oh yeah, this shit is also applicable to traveller characters from mysterious long-lost kingdoms; Sanderson is just really good at ruining the allure and mystique of enigmatic characters and concepts - Now speaking as a person who writes book reviews that include at least one swear word every sentence, it can be surmised that I am a great advocate of the use of invective, and I take umbrage on this book’s flat-out refusal to incorporate curses and instead pussy-foot around with silly made-up swear words that lack the punchy impact necessary for a swear word to work - I noticed it once in Hero of Ages, but man Sanderson is really unsubtle with his incorporations of characters who are relevant to the entire Cosmere universe that he is creating (namely whoever the fuck Hoid is); my complaint is less that he’s trying to build this big expansive universe, because usually I love that shit, but more that if you’re going to make all these interlinking connections from all the different worlds, than maybe make the inclusion of Hoid actually mean something, instead of just being mentioned? -> Now obviously this matters very very very little on this book as a whole, so I suppose you can count this as just a minor and incredibly petty criticism against Sanderson’s works as a whole; I’m a great fan of petty criticisms - 7.5/10

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