third chance i give Brandon Sanderson (fifth if we consider Legion is divided into three volumes) and now i have a fairly plausible theory on how he's able to write big books set in his even bigger universe so fast: they all lack nuance. the man simply doesn't care about it, if the five titles i've read written by him are anything to go by. a reviewer said he's a step up from a hack writer, and im starting to agree. 

the lesser of the evils: in The Emperor's Soul there's yet another mc you can't tell how old is. i understand not wanting to bluntly state the information (even though so many others, less relevant, are), but the tone of the character's inner voice should show their age without the reader having to put together little pieces of the story to know it.

all you get from the protagonist's monologue is that she's a scholarly type of Mary Sue who can literally turn superhuman when marked by a stone stamp that erases her past and replaces it with another for some time without any real consequence. how are the "soulstones" carved with this magical ability? what is the source of the magic? can anyone turn superhuman after years of carving the right marks or is our mc just that special? no one knows. the narrator swears to god that "forgery" —the ability to create anything out of anything based on the principle that every object has a past, a soul AND an identity— is more complex (or less absurd) than it seems and you're supposed to go with it.

perhaps, were the magic system purposefully whimsical rather than academic and a "science" supposedly exact, i would take it more seriously. however, the whole novella is just talk: lots of telling-not-showing in which the author brags, either through narration or dialogue (bc a high-rank politician who answers only to the emperor does NOT know how everything in the palace is built), about how badass his ideas are, how manipulative his mc is, without never really explaining or letting us see the core points that sustain and prove it all. there's history and psychology behind every carving, yet it comes off sillier than the Avengers' infinity stones.

plotwise, things are conveniently arranged and left to luck or "i hope this character is dumb enough to do exactly as i planned". the mc is tasked with forging back to life the emperor's soul, who had his brain reconstructed through forgery after an assassination attempt but his mind forever lost. [spoilers of the obvious ending ahead] another character eventually sobs out of amazement at her artistry —which would serve the thematic inspired by the ancient Chinese nobility's costum of marking works of art with a signature stamp, if only the art in question weren't considered impossible by the artist herself and didn't depend on her playing god without considering even once the dubious morality of it. on day one, she's lying that she can do it; three months later, she's whispering into the emperor's ear how she knows him better than himself after reading his diary. just like that a whole mind is reconstructed and even righted: the emperor is brand new and will now follow the path to greatness after years of laziness. and i wasted my fucking time. again.