And I’m not alone, either – something else I know and love has returned.

Yes, it’s Mistborn, and it’s still very much alive – however (and very unfortunately), alive is about as much as I’m willing to credit the new sequel.

Let’s start with the overview. The Alloy of Law (the newly-released novel) takes place 300 years after the events of the original trilogy (which, for those of you who don’t remember, or never read the books, consists of The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages – see my previous review of those books here). We find ourselves in the semi-utopia of Elendel (sound familiar?), following the story of Waxillium Ladrian, who has retired from his previous life as a “lawkeeper” in the unsettled Roughs to take control of his family’s house, and bring it from destitution. The events of the original books are now ancient history, and all our familiar friends are the stuff of legends. Our heroes, Wax and Wayne (haha, Brandon), has to fight his way through a new mystery, and save the girl and save the day, etc.

Now, the good. Sanderson, as ever, has a deeply engaging fantasy world – details thought of, oddities explained (or not, as the story calls for), etc. While most of our favorite friends are long-dead, a couple have encores in this new storyline, and Sanderson manages to write new and funny replacements for them. Allomancy and Feruchemy are back as well, and we get to see some interesting new combinations when they combine (for example, Wax, our protagonist, can manipulate his weight with his Feruchemy, and his Allomantic power, steel-Pushing, can have drastically different effects based on his weight – interesting, huh?). Many references are made to the original books (Spook’s eastern street slang becomes “High Imperial, a lofty language” used for ancient official imperial documents), and all in all, the upsides are what you’d expect from a Sanderson book – or, mostly, anyway.

However, and however unfortunately, Sanderson disappoints with this new addition (and I’m especially let down, considering that this is my favorite series of all time). Here’s why:

One: He changes the powers. Remember how, near the end of The Hero of Ages, we finally “figure out” Allomancy (or, almost) To understand the difference, you need to understand the original system. There are 16 metals:, 4 groupings of powers (Physical, Mental, Temporal, and Enhancement), each with two pairs (Internal and External), each pair with two metals (Pushing and Pulling) – so that each metal ia classifiable by these characteristics (the Physical Internal Pulling metal, for example, would be tin, and the Mental External Pushing metal would be Brass). Within each pushing-pulling pair, one metal ia an alloy of the other, and all the metals within a grouping are usually closely related. It was a system that was useful, easy to understand, and had an attractive symmetry to it. The problem? It all goes out the window in this book.

Sanderson leaves Mental, Physical, and Enhancement untouched, but the Temporal metals are butchered – Atium, and its alloy, Malatium (both fictional metals, and both central parts of the original trilogy) are thrown out the window, and replaced with Cadmium (it’s called Chromium at one point, but according to the explanation section after the book, Chromium is actually one of the Enhancement metals that was undiscovered at the end of The Hero of Ages - but we wont’ go into that now) and an alloy of Cadmium named “Bendalloy” (just try to ignore the uncreative name for now). Before, the Temporal metals all gave the user the ability to see past or future versions of a person. Now, half of them do that, and the other half literally change the passage of time itself, in a bubble around a person – one making everything in that bubble happen at supernatural speeds, the other slowing everything down to the point where an eyeblink is slower than the flow of molasses. The Temporal metals are now effectively split. Atium still exists, but it’s now classified as a “god metal” (remember how it was Ruin’s body/power?), and it, along with Larasium (Preservation’s body/power, from The Well of Ascension) are now each possible to alloy to make entirely new sets of sixteen metals. In short, the symmetry of the system is completely broken – this has been officially acknowledged, much to my dismay, and although it may not seem like a huge failing, and I admit that I may be biased because of my love for the old system, I believe that this willingness to retroactively change how things work shows part of what’s fundamentally wrong with The Alloy of Law. In addition, the new powers feel like a gimmick – “ooh, look at me, I’m messing with time” – which doesn’t help its case at all.

Two: The scale of the books feels significantly reduced. In the original three books, we have our heroes facing supernatural and seeming insurmountable problems – a god emperor, destructive deities, shapeshifting, brute force, and more. But in this new utopia? Nothing. We have Allomancy, and we have Feruchemy. No gods, no Kandra or Koloss, nothing. Essentially, the events of The Alloy of Law come down to petty crime and a vigilante trying to stop it. To put this in perspective, I’m going to quote a sentence that’s from the final chapter of The Alloy of Law, but modified to reference the other books – “It wasn’t the overthrow of a god, the collapse of civilization, or even the end of the world – it was insurance fraud.” (in the original sentence, the original “wasn’t's” were theft and kidnapping). After the original trilogy, the events of The Allow of Law feel small and inconsequential, and, quite frankly, boring.

I would like to point out that both of the previous gripes I have with this book are simply because of the fact that The Alloy of Law takes place a good deal of time after the original series – one problem because we might get bored with what we already knew (although I don’t think that would’ve happened), another problem because there’s a God who can do pretty much anything sitting up there (who was a character in the original series) – anything terrible would just be fixed, and we’d all move on. It just goes to show that authors shouldn’t have series after other series.

Three: Many of the conflicts and characters feel cliche. For example: Wax is the strong silent character who is still grieving over the loss of his lover, Wayne is the lighthearted joke-cracker who does voices, Marasi is the shy girl who’s learning how the real world works, etc. They’re characters we’ve seen before, in other books, albeit not exactly the same. The same hold for the conflicts – Wax’s obligations keep him from being with Marasi, Wax’s uncle is the bad guy and “Roughs honor” (scout’s honor, anyone?) compels him to “clean up the mess.” Again, it’s boring, and profoundly un-Sanderson-like.

Four: Most criminally, the storyline is linear, and one-note. Anyone who’s read the original trilogy can tell you how Sanderson can juggle multiple storylines at one time – in The Hero of Ages, we had Vin, Elend, Ham, and Sett at Fadrex, Sazed, Spook, and Breeze at Urteau, Marsh running around everywhere, and Ten’Soon in the homelands, with other snippets of story in other places inserted in here and there. However, that simply doesn’t happen in The Alloy of Law. We have a grand total of one storyline: Wax, Wayne, and Marasi doing detective work and beating up thugs left and right. There’s no complication, no twists, no turns in the road, even – just more subterfuge and detective work. This, to me, is the most criminal of The Alloy of Law‘s mistakes – how Sanderson seemingly abandons his usual narrative style, which is what I love the most about (most) of his writing. Nothing interesting happens – they just fight and talk their way to a predictable ending (the bad guy they’ve been fighting is captured, tried, and executed, and his mysterious employer is revealed to be the uncle who mysteriously died in the beginning of the novel). Personally, I honestly can’t understand how Sanderson could have departed so much from his beloved (and award-winning) style of writing. This, to me, is the biggest problem of them all.

TL;DR: I realize I’ve written a gigantic wall of text for you all. For those of you who didn’t finish (I know I wouldn’t have), here’s a condensed version of what I’ve said:

• Sanderson messes with the established system of his mystical powers. It’s a personal gripe, but it’s a huge one for me, and I think the retroactive changing of what was written emphasizes the other problems.
• The events of the book feel boring after overthrowing gods and saving the world. It’s insurance fraud – what’s exciting about that (in the context of the Mistborn series)?
• There are cliches – what more needs to be said about how that’s bad?
• The storyline is linear – they fight, they win, it’s over. There’s nothing confusing, or unexpected, or engaging, as is characteristic of Sanderson’s novels.

All in all, it wasn’t what I had hoped for it to be. If you feel you have to read it after reading the original series, then do so, but I think your enjoyment of the original books would be better if this book was unread – but it’s your choice. Overall,  I feel that in The Alloy of Law, the series has Wayned.

5.2/8

Our generation. These are the people who will supposedly save the messed up world that our parents left us.

*So bookchomper does care about eco stuff…*

Eh. There’s a big difference between “acknowledge” and “care”. I’m just “acknowledging” that humans don’t want to clean up the gazillion year mess (pollution, global warming, ozone layer, etc.) in their room (poor Earth).

Boy I’m in a black mood. (oh, BTW, Black Friday Pepper Spray woman? O.o)

While in Maui, I got bored after days of boogieboarding and lying listlessly on the beach like a vegetable, so I decided to start reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, one of the books that Jaion recommended me when we went “shopping”.

Image via Wikipedia

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The books recommended to me by Jaion that I have to, have to, have to, read:

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley~Yes, the title looks girly teenagey romance thang, but apparently we must not judge books by their cover..

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=bookrevi03a-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0316025062&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller~A utopian novel, that apparently I must read otherwise die.

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver~ Another girly teenagey romancey cover, but supposedly interesting concept.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ~another utopian (Jaion likes those- i’m not sure about them)

And we found:

Bordertown by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner~ A collection of poems, songs and short stories by a lot of really famous authors about a cool bordertown between the realms of humans and elves.

Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi~ Whoo. Last name.

Then went to a get a coffee (LEGAL DRUGS). Fun shopping, eh? We even got to fit in clothes shopping towards the end! 

~It’s a shame bookstores are going out of business, but trees give great hugs.

Cover of Little Brother

Cover of Brave New World

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“I was wondering if I could get a guest Post of ye… maybe a joint one or possibly one each… I’d love if you could write about a time in your life where a book was really important,  or a really strong memory of a book from when you were small. If you could stick it in the box in the contact me page on my little old blog, I’d love it. Thanks!”

So of course I responded on her blog. After a month…:

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(I will not comment on how I haven’t blogged for a really long time because my summer has been probably more busy than my school year)

I recently finished Troy, by Adele Geras. Once I got over the initial surprise of the simplicity of Geras’ prose, it was pretty good. In the sense of the style of Greek mythology and the “OH I LOVE YOU AND I WILL DIE FOR YOU AND BETRAY MY SISTER FOR YOU” kind of romantic stories. Because Greek legends are dramatic. But in a good way, because only they can pull it off. If I saw that kind of swooning in Dragon Slippers, or The Looking Glass Wars, I wouldn’t be so forgiving. Other novels that can also pull it off are: Little Women, Eight Cousins & Rose In Bloom, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, and all of Dickens.

Now that I think about it, basically all of Louisa May Alcott should be good to go.

Definitely not Jane Austen. But Jane Eyre, OH yes.

Back to Troy. I liked it, because I like Greek Mythology and Legends and their overall style of writing, even if some of it seems really impractical and I would die if I saw it happen in real life. But in make believe stories that have horses with people hiding in its belly, it’s ok. As I said before, the writing is nothing to look at, but the flyaway romance, and the descriptions of Helen (the most beautiful woman in the world, who gets to sit around and have make believe sex with make believe Paris so make believe people will die) are pretty… romantic. As in language.

..  I won’t go into the historical part of the novel, because it really wasn’t about the history, it was about the characters. Even though I put this into the Historical Fiction category. I’m sure the little history there was is correct. Trojan Horse and everything.

Speaking of the lovely characters, they are so completely blown up with drama and “honor”, that they’re so funny they’re kind of likeable in a funny way. Well, I guess there’s a bunch of main characters, because there’s a bunch of stories. It’s kinda like those movies that have multiple stories with two people for each and then by the end of the movie they’re connected in some way. That’s what this was. It was a bunch of personal issues with the Trojan War being the ever so present/violent backdrop. The names were pretty amusing though. 

So, a light, pretty forgettable read that made me laugh (always kudos).

6

~ “tsk, tsk, Mr. Beard”

The thing about short stories is that they tend to give the authors an opening for the extra crap that’s been stewing in the cracks and corners of their brains for a while, an opening to expend it into a thinly disguised toxic waste of a story. Of course, not all short stories are terrible. Notice I said “tend”. I just mean that I don’t like short stories. Especially from well known authors who have written plenty of great novels and series.

I hate to bomb Tamora Pierce (as all of her other books being spectacularly wonderful), but seriously? Her first short story compilation and it’s a go….

to the dumpster.

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t get into any of them. About half of the stories were expansions on characters from her Tortall series, and the other half were random fantasy/based on her housemother life for troubled teens stories. Sigh. Whenever “random” and “housemother life for troubled teens” are in the same sentence, you know something’s up.

Okay, there were some pretty good ideas in some of these, but in those the narrative was terrible. Sounded like City of Bones (teen novel about a girl finding out about demons and handsome demon hunters– it was supposed to be a trilogy. Now there’s six books).

In the others that didn’t even have good plotlines, those were missing dialogue. Picture this: A tree turned man and a young girl posing to be a boy trying to have a conversation. How does the tree even know how to talk???

It was interesting to learn about the background of Alanna’s Shang Boyfriend’s Unicorn Friend, and it was fun to see how Nawat reacted to human babies, and it was great to see the innermost thoughts of Kitten, but that fun only lasted for about five minutes when Kitten started sounding like a five-year old brat.

I’m done now. Bashing Tamora Pierce is sucking my strength like that vacuum sucked Kevin and Paul’s hamster from under the bed in The Wonder Years.

5

~Kevin turned out pretty well. So did Winnie. Paul…he’s a great lawyer.

Hi. My name’s LFB and I’ll be your tour guide to my book for today. Or many moons to come too since this post will always, always be up on here. On this sad, lonely little shmog. Oops, I meant blog. cog. log. bog.

So, LFB. Elphaba. That’s my name! LFB stands for Lyman Frank Baum (a male) who was the author of the children’s story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Yeah, I have a book all about me and stuff that I do and stuff that happens around my existence, but I also have a musical in my honor, and it’s pretty cool, except that I think the green stuff they use to make the actresses skin green is a little too dull. My skin is way more emerald than cloudy sea glass.

I can’t really tell you which one’s better, the musical or the book, because I tend to be a bit biased to the one that I’m in every single millisecond of my life. So I’m going to hand the mike over to this wonderful person I recently met, who has seen the musical 6 times and read the book. once. I forgive her. It’s an acquired taste.

Yep. That was Elphaba. She’s way more mellow  (and prideful) when she’s not performing in her book. I like to think of her as a dear, dear friend who I enjoy talking with about any other subject besides animals. and her sister. and water. Especially water.

You see, Wicked (the name of both the novel by Gregory Maguire and the musical) is derived from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, but it switches some stuff around. And since I like lists: *SPOILERS*

The Wicked Stuff They Don’t Tell You In Wonderful Oz

1. Elphaba, who later becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, is not evil.

2. Elphaba, the WWW, is/was friends with Glinda, the Good Witch.

3. Glinda changed her name from Galinda to Glinda because she wanted to impress a boy (the scarecrow before he was a scarecrow).

4. Elphaba was the one who turned the scarecrow into a scarecrow because it saved him from being beaten to death.

5. The Wicked Witch of the East is/was in a wheelchair.

6. The WWE is/was actually wicked.

7. The tornado and flying house thing was no accident.

8. The WWE was in love with the tin man before he was a tin man.

9. Elphaba turned the tin man into a tin man to save him from losing his heart from a spell gone awry. Being a tin man let him live without a heart.

10. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is Elphaba’s (WWW) father.

11. In the musical, Elphaba, Glinda and the boy before he became a scarecrow (his name’s Fiyero) are/were in a love triangle. In the book, Elphaba and Fiyero had an affair.

12. The water melting thing? Tricked ya. She’s still alive.

13. I’m running out of wicked stuff, here.

14. !! *oh yeah* !!

15. Flying monkeys can talk.

I think that’s a pretty good list.

Here’s my opinion, since you readers have been waiting so patiently: I like the musical better. The book is WAY MORE COMPLICATED. Not a bad thing, but just not to my taste either. The music is awesome, the costumes are awesome, the actors are awesome, the singing is awesome, so I can’t really complain. The book is great, too, but it’s way darker plot-wise.

If I had to choose my favorite aspect of these two wonderful things in life, I would say that the best thing is that I had these multiple epiphanies in the car after watching the musical the first time about who was in a relationship with who. I mean, the tin man and the Wicked Witch of the East? Scandalous. Well, I suppose Elphaba being the Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s daughter is even worse. But awesome.

As my 2nd favorite Pixar movie minor character says: “That was totally wicked!”

8

~Chistery

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How many “incarceration” action novels can there be? Hundreds. Millions.

Therefore, the real question for the author is, “how can I make the escape as awesome as possible?”

I have to say, Alexander Gordon Smith did a pretty good job with Lockdown.

2 Weeks Later

I seem to have lost interest in this book. Not good. But interesting. If it’s so forgetful, that’s something to take into account. And now I can see what things stood out now that it’s starting to fade from my memory. Here’s a list, since I like lists and they’re fast:

-Powerful images of ugly/monstrous things

-Bland character development of Alex

-Original idea for creating bombs with limited resources (and since nobody will have any idea what I’m talking about unless I say what the idea was: rubber gloves and gas.)

-No girl prisoners.

-Brutal honesty

-No stupid hopefulnesses in the teenage prisoners (seriously, being hopeful in this kind of prison is really, really impossible)

-But nonetheless, a spark of rehopefulness when a newling prisoner comes and renews the feeling.

-lots of stairs.

-and nasty dogs

-and bullies.

That’s about it. I liked it, read it in an hour, and am kind of looking forward to the second one. And the third, fourth and fifth apparently. But only the second one is out in America. British authors. Pah. British Amazon. PAH!

6

~It’s the same with the Cat Royal series. Am patiently waiting for the fifth (or was it sixth?) one to come out in America, while the teatakers are happily enjoying access to it while taking their tea.

And of course, what would a Bookchomper’s birthday be without books?

Bookchomper’s BookThrong Specially Designed by Condor (yes, very original)

-The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl

-Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

-The Pendragon Series, by D.J MacHale

-The His Dark Materials series, by Phillip Pullman

-The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, by Nancy Farmer

-Inherit the Wind, my Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee

-Ender’s Game/Ender’s Shadow (two books), by Orson Scott Card

-Every Piece of Calvin and Hobbes You Can Get Your Hands On, by Bill Watterson (it’s not technically a book, but still…)

Of course, you may have read any/all of these, but I’ve enjoyed reading every single one of them.

Do try to have at least a little fun on this very special day, OK?

Sincerely,

A friend who’s returning the favor