The Hero of Ages
Author – Brandon Sanderson
Paperback
Pages: 336 pages
Publisher: Tor
Release Date: November 8th, 2011
ISBN-10: 0765330423
ISBN-13: 978-0765330420
By my estimation, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire is a modern classic of Fantasy literature. That’s not to say it’s perfect, just that it has clearly carved out a well deserved niche in the Fantasy conversation. It did so by taking chances with the tired tropes of the genre, subverting those tropes and character archetypes without feeling forced (as is the current soup du jour in Fantasy) and telling a memorable, vast story in one volume. It’s been over two years since I finished The Final Empire, and it’s stuck with me since, constantly asserting itself as a recent Fantasy novel against which I judge the rest of the genre’s new faces. Unfortunately, it’s sequels, The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages were never able to capture that magic.
Those sequels faltered by exchanging The Final Empire’s dense, tightly plotted narrative and dashing lead, with an over-long, wordy tale full of tangential storylines and character arcs, a meandering pace and a male lead that takes too long to to evolve from a nervous, self-righteous boy to a confident, believable saviour. Ultimately, each novel ends with some of the genre’s strongest storytelling, but the first three-to-four hundred pages are generally difficult. Had Sanderson stripped the two novels down and combined them into one, we’d have one of the finest Fantasy duologies of modern times; as it is, however, we are left with a trilogy full of wonderful highs, turgid lows and much wasted promise.
But now, finally, there’s a Mistborn sequel that equals the promise and quality of the first novel. Almost.
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