ladygrey
I found this book easy to put down, which says a lot for me. After a few days, I figured out why. It highlights more than any other Sanderson I’ve read that his weakness is characters. Yes, they're well developed. But they aren't stong enough to carry the plot. In Alloy of Law, Wax, Wayne and Marasi were almost always together. They were bantering. They were talking through the problem and remembering backstory and it was fun. And the problem was personal. Even though there was the “big trains are getting robbed” problem, there was also the bad guy is going after Wax problem that really held the story together.
In this one, the characters are mostly separated, so there’s no banter and little dynamic emotions from their interactions. They're all trying to solve the problem individually. It lost any sort of mystery when Harmony started talking to Wax. Even though Wax keeps pursuing “why” the big revelation is not a revelation at all because what else would it be about. The only question is how will they stop the kandra (which I’m sure will be good because Brandon does plot well). Though I’m not sure of what I think about Lessie being a kandra all along. It seems too convenient to finally create an emotional connection at the very end of this book. It does make me curious to see where the next book goes. And it has too many connections to the first trilogy, which you think would be good but feels kind of tired—the same characters, and the kandra, and the earring. Like, use elements of the first but make them new instead of reusing them.
