Review: Mistborn Book 1: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

I've just finished Mistborn, which I read as a break before the third book in another Brandon Sanderson series, The Stormlight Archives. In short, his books are among my favourites ever. Pretty good for a book genre I thought I didn't like!

Pretttyyy cover

*I have yet to review either of the Stormlight Archives books I've read because they're so good and so long

Mistborn takes place in the 'Final Empire', a land where ash constantly falls from the sky and coats the barren landscapes, and the night is filled with mysterious mists and mistwraiths. There's the supreme Lord Ruler, a God who's been in control for a thousand years; the nobles, who live decadent lives in Keeps; and the skaa, a slave labourer class whose lives are seen as worthless. Life is extremely cruel for the skaa - they work on plantations and in factories for nobles, are killed frequently for the slightest transgression, and noblemen often take young female skaa they own (or rent from the Lord Ruler) to have sex with them, and kill the girls afterwards so they can't bear half-breed children. Only people who've lost two or more limbs are 'allowed' to beg, and the police will kick them every so often to make sure they really are helpless. 

There have been many attempted revolutions over the last thousand years of the Lord Ruler's empire, but they've barely ever even got off the ground. But now some Allomancers are on the case. 


Worldbuilding: 

There isn't a huge amount of physical worldbuilding, although we do learn that there are no flowers in this empire, and plants are all brown rather than green. The cultural worldbuilding is interesting and largely revolves around the power relationships between the skaa, the nobles and the Lord Ruler.

The magic system is the real star of the show, and is called Allomancy. Allomancy is magic of metals; Allomancers can swallow certain metals and 'burn' them for particular results - one each for strengthening senses, calming others' emotions, strengthening your physical abilities, rousing others' emotions, pulling and pushing metals from a distance, and more. The pulling and pushing of metals is really cool and I suspect would look awesome visually; Allomancers use it to basically fly around and it's cool because it's physicsy, talking about how it has to be just action and reaction, not whatever random direction you want to fly. For example, an Allomancer will drop a coin onto the ground and push against it, sending themself flying into the air because they're effectively pushing against the ground - but if the coin is in the air instead, that push will instead accelerate the coin away from the person because the person is heavier than the coin. Super cool how systematic it is, and it makes fight scenes super cool. There's also another type of magic in the book but I'll keep hush on that one. 

In what I've come to see as a Sanderson trademark, our introduction to Allomancy was mainly through the process of Vin learning how to do it, similarly to how we learned about the magic in The Stormlight Archives through [spoiler] discovering their powers and gradually learning more. I preferred how we learned more about the magic in this book, how it was more systematic. 

Characters:

I looooove themmmm. So much. I got ridiculously, painfully attached to the characters in this book - at one point about halfway through they were in trouble and I had to go for lunch, and I had to get my boyfriend to promise me the characters got through it okay to get over my anxiety about it and eat. And then near the end something really really sad happened and made me not really want to finish the book :( 

Enough about how sad their suffering made me - the characters were awesome, especially the main characters (the side characters could be a bit one-dimensional but were still pretty fun to see). Kelsier is a super charismatic though cocky team leader and is honestly a joy to be around. So daring, but impulsive. An archetype really, but still, I loved him. Vin is probably the main viewpoint character although they're joint main characters; she starts out as a street urchin, half-breed child of a prostitute and a noble, nearly killed by her mother and beaten by her brother, travelling with thieving crews and struggling for survival with absolutely no one to trust. I definitely related to her beginnings and so it was so so sweet seeing her get to be part of a crew. Kelsier creates a crew with the goal of taking down the Final Empire, and despite how dangerous the work is, it was wonderful seeing her going from a backstabbing petty thieving crew, to this one where people actually trusted each other. Lovely spots of wholesomeness between the fights.

Plot: 

A lot happens, and the first book has an awfully lofty goal. They want to overthrow this supreme emperor, who's seen as a literal god, and free the skaa. It's definitely the sort of thing you'd think would take a whole trilogy but nope, that's the goal of just the first book. At the same time, it's kinda weird because they say near the start that the plan is to overthrow the Final Empire a year from now so you're sort of waiting for that one thing to happen the whole time. But yeah, it does feel a bit rushed and like some things aren't given the time they deserved or are left a bit confusing, especially the ending.

Overall:

I absolutely loved it, though watch out if you get very invested in characters because the aforementioned incident is crushing. Nevertheless, a brilliant book with a fascinating magic system and characters I loved spending time with. There's so much more to the book that I haven't mentioned, since it has various subplots and lots of surprises (from Kelsier: 'There's always another secret'), but I think you'll just have to read it for yourself.

Source: I got my copy from the college library; you can also buy it, and if you're doing that I recommend Book Depository for free worldwide shipping.