Brandon Sanderson

As I remembering feeling about Mistborn, I felt this had some good ideas and would be solid raw material for a better story. The idea of two sisters that have to switch places is a good one, though I don't think Sanderson is adept enough at characterization to make as much of it as someone else might have. The magic system is a bit too convoluted, and as in Mistborn, too much of the climax comes in the form of revelations about its mechanics... but who cares? Also you can't use CamelCase in a fantasy novel, it's just not right! "BioChroma" is a terrible, immersion-breaking term.

It is cleverly put together, though. I did like the reveal that the comedy rogues who are always telling you how terrible they are are in fact actually terrible—if you've read Sanderson's Mistborn, you expect them to turn out like the criminals in that book, actually nice people at heart, so it's a neat use of his own past work to foil your expectations. I did kind of like the character of the languid god who wants to do more. The sequence where one sister is rendered homeless is pretty harrowing.

But it's all... a bit of a plod, you know? Almost seven hundred pages of small type, and I'm not convinced it needed to be that long, it often feels very repetitive.… (mais)

A man decided to agree to a request from his mentor and now he is on the run for his life while unable to fight even though he is a Knight Radiant. The Sunlit Man is a standalone Cosmere novel by Brandon Sanderson that sees a familiar face from Roshar finding himself mixed up with a culture in conflict on a weirdly Invested planet.

A man called Nomad, known to longtime Cosmere fans as Sigzil, arrives on the small planetoid of Canticle on the run from the Night Brigade who want him so they can find the bearer of the Dawnshard he had briefly held. Unfortunately for him the planet is small, and the sun’s light is so intense that it burns and melts the land as well as vaporizes humans. Sigzil soon finds himself caught up in an ongoing rebellion of humans from the floating city of Beacon from the tyrant Cinder King who rules over the large floating city of Union. For most of the novel, Sigzil is the narrator while a native character named Elegy gets a point-of-view near the climax to show all the action that is happening. As a result, the narrative is tight as the reader gets an idea about why Sigzil is so different than when we last saw him and in a far future era of the Cosmere so different than seen before. As usual Sanderson’s worldbuilding and his characters are fantastic while a thrilling climax to the story is just icing on the cake. Give the time period the story takes place in, Sanderson only drops hints about events in various series that have yet to be seen so while Sigzil as the main character is a spoiler that he’ll survive the upcoming fifth Stormlight book and space travel by various cultures there is no massive spoiler that will make anyone mad. It took me a while to read this book, mostly due to real life issues but once I was able to sit down and read the last half the book, it was done in just two days and just shows that when Sanderson is on his game the quality of the work keeps you very much engaged.

The Sunlit Man is a fast-paced novel that only seems to gain momentum as the pages turn with fantastic Sanderson worldbuilding and fleshing out a known secondary character given the spotlight while keeping as yet unseen events hidden from the reader.… (mais)