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A solid step forward from the cool-but-flawed first book in the Mistborn series. There's no slow start here, as the book begins kicking ass immediately. Sanderson pays you, the reader, the compliment of assuming you've read the first book, and there's little time spent in review. As a result, this book grabs you quickly and doesn't let go.

Sanderson definitely opens his vocabulary up a bit more in this book. The writing is still direct and straightforward, which plays well to his strengths as a writer of exciting, fast-moving stories, but he's being a little more elaborate and playful with the language here. I enjoyed the change. Having said that, there's a nails-on-chalkboard word choice in this book just as there was in the first. In Mistborn: The Final Empire, it was the overuse of the word maladroit. In this one, it's that Sanderson repeatedly (as in, at least a half-dozen times) says "parlay" when he means "parley," in the sense of talk or negotiate. Maybe he wrote this book while placing bets at the horse track.

The dialogue is smoother and more relaxed here than in the first book, not only getting the point across, but giving characters recognizable individual voices. Most of the conversations involving Sazed, in particular, are very good. This is part of an overall improvement in character development. Characters from the first book seem to be deepening and settling into their roles here, and newly introduced characters, whether likable or not, are all compelling and believable.

The setting continues to distinguish itself from other fantasy worlds, with additional advanced technologies making appearances. Wristwatches and three-piece suits from the first book are now joined by canned foods, coal-burning stoves, and eyeglasses. I dig it. It's almost the mirror image of the Dune universe: even though Dune is ostensibly science fiction, set in the far future, the politics are decidedly feudal, people fight with swords rather than lasers, and elements such as mentats and the spice are distinctly magical in feel. In much the same way, the Mistborn world initially presents itself as a swords-and-sorcery-type place, but tempers that with "magic" that is limited by real world physics and is constantly being expanded through research. In a literary genre where everybody but everybody robs Tolkien dry, a little uniqueness goes a long way. Very cool.

An exciting follow-up to the first Mistborn book (my review here), and one that leaves me excited to read the third (my review here).