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A review by thekarpuk
The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
4.0
Brandon Sanderson is a massive dork.
This shouldn't surprise me since this is about the 6th or 7th book of his I've read, but there are still times where I marvel at just how nerdy some elements of these books are.
The humor in his work gave me a sort of revelation on why I often find nerd humor kind of eye-rolling: it always seems like the joke teller is a bit too please with themselves in a way that feels decidedly unearned. Whoa ho, the unfunny comic relief steals stuff but leaves other stuff in its place, isn't that so quirky, I hope a straight-laced character doesn't tell him that they don't know how to react to that! It all feels, like several small elements in Sanderson books, like something that came out of being either an avid role player or game master. There's a different sort of feedback loop to that style of storytelling that makes me a bit twitchy when transferred to novels, and there seem to be more and more fantasy authors like him and Jim Butcher who feel like they plan their books like a dungeon master.
Beyond that, the fake swearing is still deeply lame. Either swear, or spend less time having characters exclaim. It's not as bad as his books set in the present day, but it's still a bit tiresome.
And if you're going to write action scenes that employ the protagonist's name frequently, please stop writing the full version. There are sections of the audiobook where the narrator was saying "Waxillium" so many times that it lost all meaning.
And everything above is an exceptional amount of griping for the absence of one star. Yes, Sanderson is a huge dork, but he also writes fast-paced actions with characters who are easy to get attached to. I've already started the next book in the series.
Because ultimately it's fun fantasy writing that doesn't have tons of purple prose, and it doesn't make me feel constantly embarrassed to read it. That counts for a lot.
If there's one major gripe I had with the actual plot itself, it's that Steris seems like too interesting a character to spend most of the novel as a damsel in distress. She's a neurotic, stick-in-the-mud with a very specific view of the world, and normally characters like that are antagonists or the butt of the joke, but Sanderson made her, like many of his characters, sympathetic and surprisingly likable. Hopefully the sequel will remedy this by giving her a little more focus.
This shouldn't surprise me since this is about the 6th or 7th book of his I've read, but there are still times where I marvel at just how nerdy some elements of these books are.
The humor in his work gave me a sort of revelation on why I often find nerd humor kind of eye-rolling: it always seems like the joke teller is a bit too please with themselves in a way that feels decidedly unearned. Whoa ho, the unfunny comic relief steals stuff but leaves other stuff in its place, isn't that so quirky, I hope a straight-laced character doesn't tell him that they don't know how to react to that! It all feels, like several small elements in Sanderson books, like something that came out of being either an avid role player or game master. There's a different sort of feedback loop to that style of storytelling that makes me a bit twitchy when transferred to novels, and there seem to be more and more fantasy authors like him and Jim Butcher who feel like they plan their books like a dungeon master.
Beyond that, the fake swearing is still deeply lame. Either swear, or spend less time having characters exclaim. It's not as bad as his books set in the present day, but it's still a bit tiresome.
And if you're going to write action scenes that employ the protagonist's name frequently, please stop writing the full version. There are sections of the audiobook where the narrator was saying "Waxillium" so many times that it lost all meaning.
And everything above is an exceptional amount of griping for the absence of one star. Yes, Sanderson is a huge dork, but he also writes fast-paced actions with characters who are easy to get attached to. I've already started the next book in the series.
Because ultimately it's fun fantasy writing that doesn't have tons of purple prose, and it doesn't make me feel constantly embarrassed to read it. That counts for a lot.
If there's one major gripe I had with the actual plot itself, it's that Steris seems like too interesting a character to spend most of the novel as a damsel in distress. She's a neurotic, stick-in-the-mud with a very specific view of the world, and normally characters like that are antagonists or the butt of the joke, but Sanderson made her, like many of his characters, sympathetic and surprisingly likable. Hopefully the sequel will remedy this by giving her a little more focus.