Review Archive

Bands of Mourning – Brandon Sanderson

The sixth book in Brandon Sanderson’s outstanding Mistborn series, Bands of Mourning is a wonderful read. Like all of the Mistborn books, it is action-packed and fast-paced, but the purpose of Bands seems-to me at least-to be more of an informational novel. It’s no secret to fans of Sanderson (and fans of this blog, if there are any out there,) that most of his novels take place in a single universe: the Cosmere. The deeper we get into a single series, the more the connection to the Cosmere becomes apparent. Bands of Mourning blows the lid off of the connection to the Grand Story, making it direct, and raising as many questions as it begins to answer. For a die-hard Sandersonian, it’s an epic feast of thought-provoking Easter eggs. I bet the forums at the 17th shard (the Sanderson fan site) are still out of control with discussions about the ramifications of what we learned

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Shadows of Self – Brandon Sanderson

The thing about Brandon Sanderson is not just that he is prolific, nor is it the fact that the quality of his books improves with every release. Those are spectacular and admirable things that make his (many, many) fans so very happy. But it’s more than that. It’s the scale of his grand universe, and the exciting worlds he’s created that grow in complexity, and the enthralling casts of characters that fill them. Shadows of Self is the second book of the second Mistborn series. That is to say that it’s the fifth book in the long-form series taking place on Scadrial, one of the planets in Sanderson’s Cosmere. (The Cosmere, if you’ve forgotten, is his universe.) The grand Mistborn series is being split by era, from a sort-of-Victorian, to a post-industrial western, and finally to a spacefaring culture in an 80s-ish setting (if I’m remembering that last one correctly). The series

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