A review by diazona
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

The Hero of Ages might be one of the most intense endings to an epic fantasy that I've ever read. I mean, they're always about saving the world in some form or another, but this is the first one I've seen where a planet was literally on the verge of falling apart. It makes for a very powerful reading experience, but it also makes the story kind of bleak on the way there.

Most of the book is about the struggles that Vin and Elend and their friends undergo in order to protect the people of the Final Empire from the evil (ish) deity (ish) that got released (ish) at the end of the previous book, while also dealing with the continual onset of the daytime mists. Humanity struggling against what is essentially a force of nature is always going to be a bit unsettling to read, and that's part of a good story, but there needs to be some hope, a vision of a path toward making everything okay at the end, and I felt like that was missing here. Given the events of the book and everything we learn about the powers of the destructive force they're up against, I wound up feeling like they really don't have a chance, and the only reason the book doesn't end with (spoiler alert?) the whole planet destroyed and everyone dead is a series of cosmic coincidences. I think the main issue is that, as much as the magic system has been very well fleshed out in terms of how it interacts with humans and the other creatures of the world, it's not well established how it works it comes to otherworldly beings and these abstract forces, and so all the interactions with Ruin feel like they're being made up as needed to drive the plot along. Much of the last part of the book, where these interactions take center stage, felt like it came out of nowhere, and (as with The Well of Ascension) I would have liked it better if there was more groundwork laid for that stuff earlier in the book so it didn't seem as arbitrary.

Despite my complaints, this was still definitely an enjoyable book to read. (Maybe I complain only because I find it worthy of complaining about - it lives up to my high expectations in so many other respects.) Like, even though the world is falling apart throughout the story, there are successes. The main characters have some good insights about Allomancy and the other metallurgical arts (i.e. magic), and there's a good amount of solid detective work, diplomacy, and military strategy that lays the groundwork for the final world-saving series of coincidences. And to be fair, some of these things that happen at the end are very much not arbitrary at all, like what gets revealed about the mists, and the history of the kandra - that was really well set up throughout the whole trilogy. The characters are well-written people with understandable motivations and personalities (except that I really don't understand Ruin's propensity for gloating), which made it easy to care about them and get emotionally invested in their quest, and in the end that's what I'm really looking for.
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