World-Building: Decent
Characterization: 2D
Plot: Unfocused
The only reason I made myself read this book after my disappointing experience with the second installment is that I wanted to have a review of the complete trilogy - the whole story. Sheer stubbornness got me through the first 3 quarters of the book because to be quite honest they were boring. It finally began to get interesting near the end, but by that time I knew exactly what was about to happen and ... instead I got random philosophizing and a "twist" at the end that made me feel nothing.
This novel follows the events of last novel and it has the same characters, but again the focus is widened. We get POV scenes with Spook, TenSoon, Marsh, and a couple of other new characters. Unfortunately, this doesn't help make the story more exciting or... doesn't help at all. Instead of focusing on Vin and Elend's angst and inaction we get to focus on the angst and inaction of a bunch of other people.
Once you get to the end it feels like a big waste of time because the characters spent the entire novel doing random things, without a coherent plan, that had nothing to do with what they knew they were supposed to be doing.
Also, everyone in this novel suddenly turns into a 2D character. I can tell what they are about to do, think, and say because they're so 2 dimensional that it's not difficult to predict and also because they've already said it a hundred times in previous chapters. This includes all the characters. Vin and Elend are 2D bad-ass ninja characters, Sazed whines the entire time about nothing, and Spook becomes superboy. Everyone else just stands around saying things that have little meaning.
Actually, the only character I kind of liked was Marsh. He actually had a struggle. He actually had to change and try hard to achieve something and he ended up achieving it in part. Unfortunately his parts in this huge tome only amount to about thirty pages put together.
The other element I wanted to talk about which is so well used in the first book and decently handled in the second is the little italicized excerpts at the beginning of each chapter. In this one they were nothing but info dumps.
I won't even get into the whole religious underpinning in the book. I hate it when authors try to write a creation myth. Tolkien, the master of fantasy, failed at it when he wrote the Silmarillion, I don't even understand why Brandon Sanderson turned his unique world and his great characters and the wonderful heist/rebellion story from the first novel into this weird ranty creation myth type story. Long and short of it, it was boring to read.
SPOILERS AHEAD
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Also, when a character such as Vin, who is all about action and very bad ass gets their hands on supposedly "God-like" powers do you really think that she's just going to hang around "floating" in the air and thinking? Seriously? For pages and pages on end?
*sigh*
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END SPOILERS
Overall, this book was disappointing. I think the author was trying to say and do too much at the same time and he unfortunately ended up saying...nothing much. If only the ending of Mistborn (the first novel) has been a conclusive end that tied everything up I would try to erase the other two from my memory. This was a series with a wonderful start, great characters, very unique world building, and, unfortunately, a progressive decline in quality.
If you're still wondering whether to read it I would recommend reading just the first installment. The other two held nothing of the initial joy and were just really lengthy emo retreads of the same things over and over and over and over.
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