Review: The MistBorn Trilogy by Brandon Anderson

Review of The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. Reviewed on Febuary 22nd, 2013. 

As a couple other reviewers on Amazon have said, if I were reviewing just the first of the three books, I'd probably give it a four or a five rating. But I just bought and read the trilogy on the Kindle, and although I did finish all three, I don't think I'll recommend them to others. Or I'll recommend the first book and suggest one ignore the other two.

I'm not going to try to justify this in a literary sense. In my recent reading, I've come down to a much more personal, fundamental judgement . . .did I enjoy the experience. More and more with recent fiction, I have to say 'Nope'. I suppose it started with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Why does modern fiction feel like it must bludgeon the reader into senselessness in order to get us to understand that there are 'stakes'. Yes, I get it . . . life can be terribly hard. More and more of the 'quality' writing, films, and television seems to want to dwell (for a long, LOOOONG time) on the absolute worst aspects of existence . . pain, suffering, betrayal, torture, loss, heartbreak, greed, stupidity, and all the other weaknesses of human nature. There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men were a recent pairing of films that epitomize the trend.

This trilogy absolutely falls into this social movement. I can and do read books that are 'dark'. I like seeing a group of characters facing hardship and toil, loss and anguish, but the denoument is also important. This trilogy, especially the second and third books, is a trudge through horror. Character grows, realizes that he/she faces a very difficult challenge, the challenge arrives and is ten times worse than realized, he suffers, she finds a new reservoir of strength or ability and, somehow, prevails. The first ten times you go through this cycle in these books, it's entertaining, but with diminishing returns. When it gets to the 20th or 30th time you see characters you sort of care about being torn to pieces, I've reached the point where there is no pleasure left . . .and I feel like a masochist for continuing.

If you liked Shakespeare's Hamlet, but thought the ending was too light hearted, so you went on to read Hamlet 2, 3, 4, and 5, where all the frivolity were excised, then Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy is for you.