#13 The Final Empire - Mistborn first trilogy by Brandon Sanderson

What can I say. Wow. I never had heard much about Brandon Sanderson. I was going through the Wheel of Time books when he started writing the final few books in the series. When I finished the first of those, I enjoyed it enough that I thought I would grab one of Sanderson’s. So I grabbed the first of the Mistborn books.

The premise completely blew me away. It was so original. What if when Frodo had taken the ring to mount doom, Sauron got it, and won. What would the world be like in a thousand years. The magic system based on metals and using those metals to do magic is so unique. It still be being revealed to this day what things can be done with them.

On top of all this, we will be doing the standard hero’s journey with a character in the book, a young lady named Vin. That is straightforward enough, so they decided that it needed another twist. Kelsier, the person that finds Vin and is going to train her, is in the middle of a giant heist. He and a crew are getting together to try and steal from the Lord Ruler. So rather than the standard journey, it would be told all the while they are trying to steal all they can from the dark lord himself.

Some of the characters are truly terrifying. the steel inquistors (think the nazgul from Lord of the Rings) They are made by the lord ruler and the process is “messy”. they are bald, covered in tatoos, and have two giant spikes hammered through their eyes that protrude from the back of their heads. In fact in later books they are death, or considered the gods of death. The image makes me shudder.