Book #14: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

OH MY GOSH. OH MY GOSH. I am totally converted to Brandon Sanderson. He has a SERIOUS talent for creating the best, clearest, most detailed worlds and plots that I have ever read. It's flat-out amazing to me the amount of planning and pre-writing and mapping out that this series (and his other books) must have taken before he even started writing. Because this book just confirms it--everything, EVERYTHING is was planned from the beginning. Even the smallest, most insignificant details from the first book come back to be important later on in this third book. There's not really a way to nutshell the plot because it's so overwhelming. Vin and Elend and the rest of the crew are basically trying to stop the world from collapsing on itself, both physically and politically.

I absolutely loved seeing how well everything fit together and how everything got resolved at the end of the series. The first book was so interesting and kind of Ocean's Eleven-esque, with a crew getting together to do a totally impossible job against a big bad evil guy. It was fun to read but kind of localized in its impact, as far as you read. The second book was a lot slower and less interesting with a lot of politics and the crew trying to run the country after they'd taken it over, so it seemed like they were working on a much larger scale. But this third book--it was asking questions about God and forces of nature and saving the world from being destroyed by ash and volcanoes and rampaging herds of wild animals, and it was so huge in scale and in the impact that it's hard to even believe that someone could even imagine something that big. I loved how everything wrapped up at the end, loved loved LOVED how it ended and who ended up being the "Hero of Ages" after all, and how he ended up saving (or re-creating) the world after all was lost.

I really liked the religious undertones of it all. Sazed, the Keeper who has always studied and believed in all religions, goes through a serious crisis of faith after the woman he loves dies at the end of the second book. This whole book he loses all interest and he decides to go through every different faith he has collected to decide which is true, and he eliminates all of them. But in the end, he learns and realizes the fact that faith has to be chosen, and religion in its essence is not based on logic. And his ability to believe, and his knowledge of the religions he has studied his whole life, ends up saving the world and enabling him to create a new, better world than the one they were fighting to save. It was such a beautiful ending. I also loved the epigraphs to each chapter, how they kind of gave hints of what was going on and what the writer had learned.

I have a lot of other things I could say about this book, but I don't have time. Totally loved it--I would recommend this series to anyone, not just fantasy lovers.