Last winter, I was getting ready to take an eight-hour trip on Amtrak to visit my brothers in North Carolina. While perusing the bookstore in Union Station, I came across Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris. As I regularly listener of Sanderson’s writing podcast, I had considered picking up his work before. I’m usually wary of genre fiction, despite my affinity for Sci-Fi. It’s inconsistent, I know. But it was my desire to resolve that inconsistency that led me to buying Elantris.
Being his first published work, the book was a bit rough around the edges, but I liked it enough to pick up Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy this spring, which was a much more well-developed work that I thoroughly enjoyed. This led to me to reading Sanderson’s only other standalone novel and the subject of today’s blog, Warbreaker.
I’m about a fifth of the way through Warbreaker now, and so far… not much has happened. I’ve been introduced to the key players in the narrative and have had the setting established. The world seems richly developed and well thought out. Sanderson’s notable magic system is in place, if not yet fully explored. For the most part, however, the the book hasn’t really grabbed my attention. I contribute this to two things.
First, Sanderson’s other books also tend to be slow builds. It’ll plod along through the first act, start racing through the second, and then be charging at a breakneck pace through the climax. It’s his style, and I don’t hold it against him. I just haven’t gotten there yet. If this was my only complaint, then I wouldn’t have much to write about for this blog.
The other reason book hasn’t grabbed my attention is because, as yet, we don’t have a very clear protagonist. The three main viewpoint characters, Siri, Vivenna and Lightsong, all share screentime equally. None of them are breakout characters. Sanderson seems to go out of his way to show us how each of them is naive in their own way, and I have trouble seeing any of them seriously driving the plot forward. The only other major viewpoint character we’ve had, Vasher, has barely appeared since the prologue. He is poised to be the strongest character in the novel (and by far the most interesting), and yet has been almost absent beyond the first ten or fifteen pages. I’m sure he’ll be around later, but I was really hoping to see more of him by now.
There’s not much else to say at this point. Hopefully I’ll finish the novel this week and have a full review ready soon. I fully expect the novel to catch me at some point. There are lot of good seeds being spread. Themes like love, family, loyalty, religion, and especially politics are all being woven together skillfully. Making themes like these all come to head is something Sanderson does well.
Will I like this novel better than Mistborn? That remains to be seen. But I seriously doubt I’ll be disappointed.
