Brandon Sanderson's "Warbreaker"

Cafe Society
1

Reading Warbreaker is like getting punched in the solar plexus. I say that as a good thing.

Brandon Sanderson has come out with another masterpiece. The setting is original, the system of magic is complex and well-thought out, the characters are three or four dimentional, and nothing is quite what it seems. Oh, and he loves playing around with cliches, lampshading them, turning them inside out, subverting them, and subverting them again. The man is just… incredible.

I hate it when people write reveiws and don’t say what the book’s actually about. So I’ll post the description on the jacket:

Also, the number of unresolved questions at the end makes me think there might be a sequel. Here’s hoping.

2

I have just started it and find it to be promising. However, for some reason when I sit down to read it isn’t the first book I pick up. It *seems *to have promise, but has not yet pulled me into the “must have more” mode.

3

Is the Mistborn Trilogy the other masterpiece you speak of?

4

Is it better than Elantris? I barely made it 50 pages into that one. Inane dialogue, telling rather than showing (way too much telling), and unnecessary description. It was disappointing because the premise was intriguing.

5

I liked Elantris. I’m not very critical, I guess. But the description of the new one sounds way too complicated for me.

6

I didn’t like Elantris, either. He gets better.

7

I rather liked Elantris. It developed very well.

8

I liked Elantris pretty well, though it did take a while.

I just finished the 3rd Mistborn book and really enjoyed that. Sanderson must have a mind like a labyrinth.

9

Elantris seems to be one of those YMMV works.

Actually, from what I’ve seen on the Net, people either love everything Sanderson wrote, or they think some of it is genius and some of it is awful.

10

His books’ best qualities are their plots and magic systems. I love the fact that he’s added very strict and consequent restrictions on both. Sometimes (Mistborn 2) he adds a whole great deal of too much filler, though.

11

I think that’s his book’s second best qualities. His best quality is that he knows how to write endings. The stories may be long, but they go places.

12

I just finished Warbreaker a couple of days ago. I saw a major improvement in writing between Elantris and Mistborn, and a bit more improvement with Warbreaker, though the difference wasn’t as great. (We’ve been following Brandon’s career since he’s a friend of my brother’s, and just hired my brother as his assistant a couple of months ago.)

There is going to be a sequel (Nightblood), though he probably won’t get to it for several years, with all the other stuff he has going on. He’s starting a major ten-book series called The Stormlight Archive (unless this gets changed). He just finished writing the first book, The Way of Kings–which in reality has absolutely nothing to do with the reviews on this page.

I enjoyed this interview with Brandon. It’s almost half an hour long, but substantive.