Fofo’s #CBR5 Review #6: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

Target: Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker

Profile: Epic Fantasy

I was incredibly excited to get started on this month’s book sequence; namely, a speedy run through the remainder of Brandon Sanderson’s bibliography.  I can’t really talk about why because of spoilers.  Suffice it to say my re-read of The Way of Kings revealed something that I missed because it was the first Sanderson book I had ever read.  While I may still dislike the man for his abysmal treatment of The Hero of Ages, I have to say that the greater body of his work is quite good, and the more you read of it, the better it gets.

Warbreaker was originally a free web publication that was serialized on Sanderson’s website.  Older draft copies of some of the chapters are still available there, but I ended up reading the finished novel in paperback form.  While it shares a number of traits with Sanderson’s other epic fantasies, Warbreaker feels like a very different kind of novel.  In the same vein of the Mistborn sequence, it plays with the extremes of power, wealth and status and transposes a more modern society into a fantasy setting.  Sanderson’s strong emphases on religions and cohesive magic systems are also present, but the sum of these parts ends up being very different because, at its heart, Warbreaker is a story about averting a crisis, rather than confronting one.

Read the rest of the review…

Malin’s #CBR5 Review #7: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson is an author I first discovered when he got the job completing The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Having long ago given up on Robert Jordan (seriously, book seven pretty much turned any love I had for that series into ashes), I wasn’t really bothered at first, but the internet kept saying such wonderful things about Sanderson’s own writing, and I decided to try his Mistborn trilogy (reviewed all the way back in 2009 – use the search function on my blog if you’re interested). While I have absolutely no interest in his fan fic completion of Jordan’s books (it’s fan fiction even if it’s based on Jordan’s notes and authorised by his estate, don’t try to convince me of anything else), I have become a huge fan of his other books. The fact that he writes entertaining books, frequently stand alone (always a plus, but oh so rare, when reading fantasy) and is terrifyingly prolific has endeared him greatly to me. He was also super sweet and unfailingly patient and polite at the signing where I met him, making me a huge fan of his. Warbreaker is one of his stand alone novels, and it hasn’t not exactly made me like him less.