I recently finished Brandon Sanderson’s first book, Elantris. I liked his Wheel of Time and Stormlight books. Plus I heard that all of his books are connected inside a sort of shared universe. I figured that would be interesting and worth checking out.
Unfortunately, this book did not really do it for me. I enjoyed some of it. I liked the characters. I thought the magic system was pretty cool. I guess you could really tell that Sanderson was not as polished a writer as he has become.
I also thought the book was very simplistic. I guess since he was writing a single novel, he did not have the pages to expand many of his ideas. For example, the world sounds like there are only five countries. Is it a small planet or are there a bunch of places not explored?
The biggest thing that bothered me though was the religiosity of the book. I felt like there was some preaching going on. The one group (one religion, two sects I suppose) is converting people and one of their leaders has very little faith. Also, they dabble in a dark form of magic. The other group is more righteous and yet also more persecuted. They are becoming a dying sect. Is this supposed to be Islam and Judaism? Or maybe the normal Christian church versus the Mormon church (since Sanderson is a Mormon). Not really sure, but I could not get past it.
Even though I did not enjoy this book, it will not deter me from reading some more of Sanderson’s works.