I found book three to be a frustrating slog.
As I said, book one laid out a fascinating setting that pulled me into the story. Book two built upon that in interesting ways, even as the plot itself slowed down in a way I didn't care for. But I think book three throws all the rules out the window.
Like many fantasy series, Mistborn is a world filled with magic and magic users. There are plenty of people in the world who wield some degree of power, but the story really focused -- as such stories generally do -- on one particularly "super-powered" character. Book one followed that character coming into her powers. Book two put that character up against problems that superpowers can't solve, and in dilemmas where she couldn't be in "two places at once."
In book three, everybody has super powers. A character who has never wielded magic of any kind now has it in this book, to as full an extent as the main protagonist has always had. Another character who has had minor -- almost trifling -- magic ability now suddenly wields vastly more magic than he has before. Yet another character, who'd never previously been a "perspective" character for the narrative, becomes one in this book, magnifying the extent to which it feels like their sort of magic-adjacent abilities drive the plot.
There are explanations for all of this, reasons why everyone is suddenly "leveling up" both within the story and as matter of narrative construction. Still, to me, it doesn't make for a fun read. Magic becomes the answer for everything. There's never a sense of true danger, never the notion that any problems might be insurmountable, never the feeling that anyone is in over their heads. This book has no stakes.
On top of that, Sanderson spends an outsized number of pages on material that wouldn't feel important even under the former "terms and conditions" of the story. In the middle of the book, when the two main characters make time over multiple chapters to attend not one but two lavish balls, it was all I could do to keep reading. As another character spends literally the entire book paging through historical records, it hardly mattered to me that it was an expression of his deep crisis of faith, I couldn't help but be bored by the repetitiveness.
There is one compelling subplot of the book, though it doesn't get enough attention. I mentioned earlier that one character whose perspective we'd not previously gotten comes to the foreground in this final book. And while I don't love how their "magic" lends to an over-magicked whole, I did enjoy the insights into what makes the character tick. The character is the closest thing to an "alien" in this fantasy setting, caught up in a web of different societal values, and driven by an entirely different way of thinking. I felt this story ultimately did enrich the novel, though it was only one small part of a frustrating whole.
The ending was most frustrating of all. It's certainly of a piece with the "too much magic" I felt of the rest of the book, resolving all the problems by escalating the power once again beyond its already-escalated levels. And while I can't claim that the conclusion is "without consequences," I'd long since stopped caring enough about the characters involved for any sacrifices they made to matter to me in the slightest.
I give The Hero of Ages a D, about the lowest mark I could imagine giving to a full-length novel that I actually finished reading. If I didn't have the prior experience of finishing the Skyward series (and liking it from beginning to end), I'd quite likely be done with Brandon Sanderson altogether at this point. Certainly, I'll question ever giving his other "classic fantasy" books a try.
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