Defiant to the End

I've finally finished my first series written by Brandon Sanderson: I recently completed Defiant, the fourth and final book of the Skyward series. This concludes the saga of Spensa, the brash young warrior who flies space fighters against her people's powerful alien adversaries. (Ok, there's way more too it than that, but I'm not going to spoil four novels and three novellas' worth of plot here, even if I could find a way to do so succinctly.)

Sanderson is best known, of course, for his fantasy writing -- not science fiction, as this series is. But I've stalled in finishing his original Mistborn trilogy after what I thought was a lackluster book two. So this was my first exposure to one of his endings -- endings being arguably the other thing he's best known for (having completed many series of his own, as well as Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time). Did Sanderson have what it took to stick the landing?

Mostly, yes. From a story perspective, I was more than satisfied. The Skyward series has more than a dozen notable characters, and that's more than I'd expect to receive a "great" ending. But the story wraps up well for the main character, Spensa; the most important secondary characters also conclude satisfying arcs; most of the tertiary characters get a potent moment in this final installment. (And in a deft bit of narrative construction, the story does very much end while still leaving the door open for future stories of a different nature -- and it's already been announced that Sanderson's co-author on the Skyward novellas will be taking that up.)

But I had some reservations about the writing of this final book. Every part of the Skyward series so far has been told in the first person. The fact that you only get Spensa's perspective on things plays a crucial role in how the story is received by the reader. It's also part of what made the three novellas (in my view) essential reading in the overall narrative: when Spensa is separated from the rest of the characters for the bulk of books two and three, it falls to the novellas to chronicle what's happening in her absence. (And notably, even the novellas maintain a first-person conceit, each of the three being told from a different single character's perspective.)

This final book starts out from Spensa's perspective just as all the other main books have done. But just as the final act begins, about two-thirds of the way through the book, that convention is compromised. About half the chapters continue to be "first-person Spensa," but the other half are told third-person, focusing on different characters. Some of these aren't even the characters who were featured in the novellas. One, most jarringly, is the antagonist of the story -- why, this late in the game, do we need to know this person's inner thoughts?

The answer would seem to be purely practical: there's too much happening at the end of this story that the main character cannot personally be present for, and so it's difficult to deliver a satisfying ending without breaking the first-person convention. And yes, I want that satisfying ending, and so I suppose I ultimately have to agree with breaking the established "rules" in order to provide one. At the same time, this feels like trying to have your cake and eat it too. There are reasons a writer chooses to tell a story in the first person, and there are consequences of that choice that you have to accept and work around. Sanderson did that for three-and-two-thirds books... and then just gave up at the finish line. Did he always know this was the general ending he was working toward, and just never cared? Did he just need to get on to his next book, and didn't want to make time to try for some other ending? (I guess I can respect the choice not to become a George R. R. Martin, Scott Lynch, or Patrick Rothfuss.)

Most readers might not even care about this sort of thing, and might say I'm just nitpicking here. "Rules are made to be broken," some say. But I would say that when it comes to writing, rules are made to be ignored. There are countless "rules" of storytelling, and a writer is welcome to curate their own collection of which ones to embrace and which ones to abandon. But I feel like once you choose your toolbox, you really have to earn the decision to abandon it later. Defiant is a good enough ending to the Skyward series. But I think it's not that good.

I give Defiant a B. (Like I said, "good enough.") I think the series as a whole is worth reading (with or without the novellas, though my recommendation would be "with"). At the same time, this wasn't really the stellar experience I might have needed to nudge me into finishing book three of Mistborn -- that's going to take some more time.