The Well of Ascension

 

It's a quarter after midnight, my sleep cycles are are impossible to regulate, and I just finished the second book in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, The Well of Ascension, not twenty minutes ago. What better time to write a review?

I'm going to start off the same way I did last time: the cover art. The same artists worked on these ones (Jon Foster for the hardback, Christian McGrath for the mass market paperback) as the first book, and both are of great quality. As before, I prefer the hardback cover art, despite having the paperback version of the book. However, I don't find either cover as enticing as the ones for Mistborn: The Final Empire. I miss the bold lines of the hardback and vibrant color of the paperback in the original book.

Plot twists make The Well of Ascension. They are huge. You will go into reading the second book expecting the unexpected, because of the events in the first, and will still end up being completely surprised. Mr. Sanderson pulls no punches when he intends to throw you off-balance, and he subverts expected outcomes in some very brutal ways. Brutal is not a bad thing in storytelling though—just ask fans (myself among them) of A Song of Ice and Fire. And this is not nearly so brutal as that.

And perhaps that is what makes it so much more emotional when such things occur. In A Song of Ice and Fire, one is wary of getting too attached to the characters (though it happens anyway) because more than likely, some very bad things are going to happen; that isn't the case in Mistborn. Bad things aren't guaranteed to happen. Until they do.

I was just starting to get attached to... when he....

I'm not crying. I just got some dust in my eye. That's all.

The action was a bit more spread out in this book compared with the first, but when it happened, it happened big. You even have an epic battle between armies at the end, as if to make up for the decrease in frequency. There is a very long buildup before it happens, but Mr. Sanderson delivers in great fashion. Did I ever tell you that Sazed is badass? No? Well, you'll find that out once you get to this part.

Oh, and there's an exploding head somewhere in the middle of the book.

The Well of Ascension does not falter in the wake of the first book of the trilogy. It's full of mystery, political maneuvering, action, love (perhaps I should have gone on in more detail about this, but let's just say that Stephenie Meyer could take a lesson from Brandon Sanderson in this department), and great characters. It will not disappoint; to not read this book would be a great loss on your part.

Rating: Awesome