This is my final reading project book of 2023 and I have lots of thoughts about it. To my mind, this was the best book of the trilogy. It made me realize how slow the pacing was in the first two novels. All of a sudden, Sanderson quits teasing us with obscure hints and lambastes us with the details of WTF is going on.
Vin and Elend have become more like business partners than a married couple. Yes, they work together well, but the passion is all for the people of the kingdom, rather than each other. On other relationship fronts, the major characters are all matched up—Breeze with Allriane, Ham gets reunited with his family, and Sanderson creates Beldre especially to pair up with Spook. Unfortunately, these pairings felt wooden to me. Everyone must have a match, but none of these relationships are really important to the plot.
The best part for me was the closer look that we got at the Kandra, the Terris people, and the Inquisitors, even the Koloss. The reveals about the nature of Allomancy and Feruchemy were the most interesting part of the tale, especially since Allomancy has always seemed too logical and regimented to me. Magic should be…..well, magical. Not subject to analysis or completely predictable. Now the mathematical nature of the system makes more sense—the combinations of metals with various abilities to create certain kinds of being.
The central idea of the series seems to be the nature and necessity of faith. We watch Sazed struggle with a loss of faith and his desire to have his faith restored. He has suffered the loss of the woman he loved, a circumstance that tests many people. If you have lost significant people in your life, you can relate to some part of his situation. The final verdict seems to be the obvious: faith cannot be proven, only experienced. I'm a little muzzy on whether one can actually choose faith, as several characters do. Can you force yourself to feel faith? The jury's still out on the issue for me.
I'm a fan of messy, uncertain endings, so this book wrapped up a little too neatly for my taste. Not a bad end, just too easily resolved. But I know lots of folk prefer this kind of resolution, so I am in the minority there.
Book number 510 of my Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Project
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