Shadows of Self

Either I’m getting kind of tired of Brandon Sanderson’s writing style or this book in particular didn’t resonate well with me. It wasn’t boring and the story was interesting enough, it just felt kind of annoying at times.

I must admit that it’s been around ten years since I read the first Mistborn trilogy and while the fourth book in this series worked quite well as a standalone, this one was having a lot more references that I no longer understood. I wish there had been more explanations for those than endless repetitions of how pushing, pulling and metalminds worked.

Of course, as usual, the ending was very well written and made up for a lot of the shortcomings.

I really enjoyed the original Mistborn trilogy. I read the first book of this second trilogy quite some time ago and wasn't keen. I then picked this up cheap and thought I'd give it a chance. I was disappointed. I'm not sure if it's just that too much time has passed between reading the original books (or indeed the first of this new set) meant I didn't understand the references, or the fact time has passed in the series itself and the setting (a sort of wild west/industrial age) doesn't appeal to me as much. I'm not against fantasy set in more modern time periods, this just didn't interest me much. I'd even go as far as to say I found it quite dull and didn't really care what happened to the characters. It's a shame as I usually enjoy the author's output.