A review by duffypratt
The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
4.0
Sanderson plays with Harry Potter, and does it quite well. There's a boy at a school for magic. There's a mystery at the school as kids start to disappear. The boy gets involved in solving the mystery, and in saving the world. But that's pretty much where the similarities end.
The magic here is unlike that in Harry Potter. Instead of waving a wand and saying something vaguely latin sounding, the Rithmatic students spend much of their time mastering arcane geometry and drawing techniques. Rithmatics is a way of fighting with chalk figures, and it would be pretty pointless, except that the world has become infested with wild chalkings who have the nasty habit of eating the human flesh that they encounter, and these chalkings can only be fought with magical chalking, or with acid baths. Only a very few people have Rithmatic talent, and the talent needs quite a bit of development, since it is an intricate magical system that veers closely to a kind of alternate science.
Our hero, unlike Harry, is sixteen when it starts. He has a mother. There is no prophecy about him. He's basically ignored by everyone, and he does badly at his school. His bad performance derives from two facts: he is not a rithmatist, and he is obsessed with rithmatics. Thus, the only thing that interests him is something that everyone says is none of his business. As it turns out, he is extraordinarily gifted in everything that has to do with the knowledge aspects of rithmatics, but he has no gift for actually bringing chalk figures to life. So, everyone thinks, his knowledge is basically pointless.
The basic premise is very good, and even better, Sanderson puts this in an alternate world which is cool in its own right. At some point, this Earth veered from ours, but its not clear exactly when or how. The United States is not a continent here. Rather, it is sixty islands, each with its own government, and only unified in some very sketchy fashion. The center of disturbance in this world is on the island of Nebrask, and that's where rithmatists go to fight wild chalkings when they have gotten adequate training.
On top of this, the world is steampunk/gearpunk. Machines are driven by complicated spring/gear systems, including spring run trains and guns. The inventor of these systems was the saint Da Vinci. I don't know if Sanderson picked Da Vinci because his name was recognizable, or if there are specific drawings of Da Vinci's that he had in mind. There is also some mysterious relationship between gears and rithmatics, but its only touched upon here.
The plot was engaging for a YA mystery, and the writing was good for Sanderson. I didn't have any of the problems with the writing style that had cropped up for me in Words of Radiance. In particular, I did not notice any egregious use of adverbs here. My suspicion is that there was more care taken with the editing here. Also, the book had a good deal of charm, and the characters had a bit more depth than I generally expect from a YA book, especially the adult characters. And, there were some genuine surprises here. I won't go into them, but a few things developed in ways that veered nicely from what tends to be required in this kind of YA book.
So, a fun world, with interesting and likable characters, and some unexpected twists, all charmingly told. I will definitely pick up the next installment in this series if Sanderson gets around to writing it. I think he's juggling somewhere around six series at once right now, and I have no idea how he does it. People think I'm odd for reading 4 or 5 books at a time, and he writes more than that, all at once.
The magic here is unlike that in Harry Potter. Instead of waving a wand and saying something vaguely latin sounding, the Rithmatic students spend much of their time mastering arcane geometry and drawing techniques. Rithmatics is a way of fighting with chalk figures, and it would be pretty pointless, except that the world has become infested with wild chalkings who have the nasty habit of eating the human flesh that they encounter, and these chalkings can only be fought with magical chalking, or with acid baths. Only a very few people have Rithmatic talent, and the talent needs quite a bit of development, since it is an intricate magical system that veers closely to a kind of alternate science.
Our hero, unlike Harry, is sixteen when it starts. He has a mother. There is no prophecy about him. He's basically ignored by everyone, and he does badly at his school. His bad performance derives from two facts: he is not a rithmatist, and he is obsessed with rithmatics. Thus, the only thing that interests him is something that everyone says is none of his business. As it turns out, he is extraordinarily gifted in everything that has to do with the knowledge aspects of rithmatics, but he has no gift for actually bringing chalk figures to life. So, everyone thinks, his knowledge is basically pointless.
The basic premise is very good, and even better, Sanderson puts this in an alternate world which is cool in its own right. At some point, this Earth veered from ours, but its not clear exactly when or how. The United States is not a continent here. Rather, it is sixty islands, each with its own government, and only unified in some very sketchy fashion. The center of disturbance in this world is on the island of Nebrask, and that's where rithmatists go to fight wild chalkings when they have gotten adequate training.
On top of this, the world is steampunk/gearpunk. Machines are driven by complicated spring/gear systems, including spring run trains and guns. The inventor of these systems was the saint Da Vinci. I don't know if Sanderson picked Da Vinci because his name was recognizable, or if there are specific drawings of Da Vinci's that he had in mind. There is also some mysterious relationship between gears and rithmatics, but its only touched upon here.
The plot was engaging for a YA mystery, and the writing was good for Sanderson. I didn't have any of the problems with the writing style that had cropped up for me in Words of Radiance. In particular, I did not notice any egregious use of adverbs here. My suspicion is that there was more care taken with the editing here. Also, the book had a good deal of charm, and the characters had a bit more depth than I generally expect from a YA book, especially the adult characters. And, there were some genuine surprises here. I won't go into them, but a few things developed in ways that veered nicely from what tends to be required in this kind of YA book.
So, a fun world, with interesting and likable characters, and some unexpected twists, all charmingly told. I will definitely pick up the next installment in this series if Sanderson gets around to writing it. I think he's juggling somewhere around six series at once right now, and I have no idea how he does it. People think I'm odd for reading 4 or 5 books at a time, and he writes more than that, all at once.