欧宝娱乐

Warning: the review that follows is terribly unprofessional (you know, in the way that no one ever bitches about for some reason) and full of love and lots and lots and lots of

because REASONS.




I think I've wished for half-stars maybe three times, at the outside, in the years I've been on 欧宝娱乐. Generally, though I may waffle between stars for a little while, I can settle on a rating which I feel accurately represents my feelings about the book in a... mostly unemotional manner. (All my ratings are to some extent emotionally based; I am, after all, not a computer.)

However, when it comes to Brandon Sanderson books I'm simply so biased that this system doesn't work for me. I'm not sure half stars would help, actually. What I really need is a system that breaks the book down into qualities like 'writing style' and 'plot coherency' which I can then rate out of ten because, considering them separately, I could probably manage more objectivity. This system would then spit out a rating based on the average of the subcategories, which would likely be lower by at least a star than my shiny emotional-first-reaction five stars up there.

Since this system has yet to be created, let alone implemented, the five stars will stay. Take them with a grain of salt; the book is not perfect, but I honestly do not care.





And now, after two preambles, we bring you the main event: an actual review of the book, and not just Anila's abstract feelings about it and the rating system. We'll start with the bad, because it's the smallest section.

Like most first novels, Elantris suffers from some predictable problems. Sanderson's prose is rockier here than I'm used to - I've noticed over time that, logically enough, it becomes more polished with each new work, so of course this would be the roughest of them all. The two main characters, Raoden and Sarene, feel like prototypes of the characters he's put in his later work: they're larger-than-life and slightly messy combinations of the virtues and flaws that he's since separated out to make more realistic, tidier characters. Here we see the seeds of Kelsier's leadership and idealism, Vin's cynicism, Elend's bookishness, Jasnah's keen intelligence and sharp attitude. As is to be expected, all those qualities are powerful when used in moderation in other characters; here, they feel a little bit exaggerated and unlikely, particularly in Raoden. Speaking of Raoden - I love him, really (more on this later) but some aspects of his character felt a weeeeee bit deus ex machina. (view spoiler)[His unexplained 'affinity' for the Aons being the big one, of course. (hide spoiler)] With characters like this, it comes as no surprise that scenes of conflict are underwhelming: not only are our heroes almost absurdly full of virtues, they're also extraordinarily talented and powerful in many areas. Everyone else is sort of dim next to them, and so any confrontation doesn't last long and no one really puts up a fight. It's hard to be invested in the tension of a scene or feel emotions at success when the ending was a foregone conclusion.


...I think that's all the bad stuff. Excellent. Let's move on to the meat of this review: things I love without shame or moderation.

1. The concept. And not just the whole 'Eternity ended ten years ago' thing even though wow, what a killer tagline, am I right? No, what appealed to me most was the way Elantrians - now cursed - changed their natures to suit the situation. What they are has forced them to adopt or lose their minds to neverending pain, and it's really fascinating.

"On the outside, people tend to be convinced of their own immortality. We are more realistic. One rarely wins a battle without at least a few wounds, and here even a couple of slight cuts can be more devastating, and more agonizing, than a swift decapitation."

This is most interesting, I think, for its contrast to conventional fantasy. Usually in a fantasy novel there will be someone who can heal with a touch or a spell or a potion; failing that there are herbalists, doctors, sometimes even surgeons. The Elantrians, however, have none of the above nor the resources they would require to be effective - and on top of that, even if they did, their wounds would still never heal. The way this changes their interactions varies depending on the situation, but in general creates a world where only the half-mad actually fight other people. One injury too many means a fate worse than death; it could turn a previously sane man or woman into a listless broken wreck who can do nothing more than chant a mantra of their greatest regrets over and over and over again.
This is really astounding, in a worldbuilding sense, and forces what might otherwise have been a violence-centric story to become one of diplomacy and negotiation. It's also all the more painful when people are injured, as does happen from time to time, because the reader knows what they are suffering and that they have lost the last shred of their humanity, but will be forced to live on without it.

2. Raoden.

I have... feelings about Raoden.
The truth is, I sorta adore all the male characters Brandon Sanderson creates. Raoden, however, is the only one I want to pluck out of the book and mash faces with. (view spoiler)[(If Kelsier were real, he and I would be at loggerheads over the whole 'wiping out a group of people because of circumstances beyond their control' thing, and as for Elend, well, would you dare to steal Vin's man? No, thought not. Kaladin is too good for me, and also belongs right in that book where he already is, thank you very much, so I can have more wonderful exploits and badassery to read about.) (hide spoiler)] which is not really a spoiler but actually a tangent.
Raoden started worming his way into my heart on page 51. How?

"Books!" Raoden said with excitement.

Open note to all authors: any character who reacts exuberantly to the presence of books will start out in my good graces. If it's your love interest, well... bonus points are an understatement. Enthusiasm for books and enthusiasm for whales are two hugely appealing things to me.
Anyhow, that's really just the beginning. Raoden is the kind of character who, like Kaladin, would be the center of a lot of montage scenes if this book were made into a movie. He's one of those leader types who goes in and gathers people who all love him and help him work towards a goal and they're successful and it's beautiful and deep down inside you know it can't last because the montage is just leading up to the big emotional moment when everything goes south, but you really really really want them to just do everything right and live long happy lives in the paradise they've created for themselves. I love montage scenes, and I love the people who orchestrate them, and really this is kind of pathetic but one of the easiest ways for a character to become sympathetic and engaging is for them to participate in one. Trufax.
There's also the fact that not only is Raoden enthusiastic about books, he recognizes their value as a resource and uses them to solve problems. Words cannot express how many characters in how many books could have fixed their shit right up if they would just , or the nearest comparable resource. (I include older, more knowledgeable characters in 'resources', by the way. Seriously, guys, sometimes adults really do know something important. Talk to them. It bears noting that this is only a little bit of a tangent and not actually off-topic, because Raoden makes a point of learning from other characters. WUT.) Raoden manages to figure out a great deal about Elantris and what caused its problems by careful research and logical deduction. (view spoiler)[I do agree with the assertion that he comes by this deduction rather too easily, the same way that he gets a nebulous 'affinity' for Aons rather too easily. Buuuut... whatever. And anyhow, the primary tidbit of information that enables him to solve the riddle - that the basic Aon represents the major geographic features of the land - comes from someone else, so that gives him a little more leeway in my eyes. (hide spoiler)]
Umm. There will be more (spoilery) fangirling over Raoden later. Yes, in a whole other subsection. This is what I mean by feelings.

3. Sarene.

...a lanky, brusque woman who was almost past her prime.

Sarene is not my favorite of Sanderson's female characters. That would be Jasnah Kholin, always and forever. She is also not the most well-rounded or well-developed character in this book, and she has a lot of habits and characteristics that annoyed me.
A lot of them annoyed me, though, because I see them in myself.
Personal digression in spoilers; has nothing to do with plot: (view spoiler)[I'm eighteen and I've never once been asked out, let alone kissed. To my knowledge, no one has ever had a crush on me. I don't know why, and I'm not sure I would want to, because in general I really like who I am, but sometimes (especially when I'm talking with friends my age who have steady boyfriends or, even worse, change boys frequently) I'm struck by a feeling of missingness. Something is absent. I form perfectly wonderful emotional connections with other people, and I have friends that I love like siblings or better, but the physical aspect is just - not there. It's not something I worry about all the time, not by a long shot. I'm not a particularly physical person; I don't wish I had a significant other so I could jump their bones. But it would be nice to have someone I felt that comfortable with in that way - someone who I could walk with holding hands, or whose shoulder I could rest my head on, or whose cheek I could kiss in just a casual, natural, affirmative way. I miss that, as much as anyone can miss something they've never had, and so I understand how Sarene feels so very, very well. The longing that she feels for that kind of emotional connection may be annoying to some readers, but to me it feels intensely real. (hide spoiler)]
Ummm.
It's a little hard to re-ground myself after that. Sorry.
Anyhow, Sarene. Yes. Sarene is a pistol. I admired her spunk (for lack of a better word) from the get-go: she finds herself in a country not her own, legally married and obligated to mourn for a dead man she never met, frustrated by a king who thinks women are for decoration and court ladies who act as if he's right. And of course, as soon as she decides that the kingdom of Arelon is in trouble, she does everything in her power to help it, even though she owes it no obligation. Interestingly enough, she doesn't really do it out of pure selflessness.

She had spent nearly three decades loving a country without ever feeling it loved her back. Teod had respected her, but she was tired of respect. She wanted something different from Arelon.

Sarene is, I think, the second most flawed character in this book. She wants to do good, yes, but that's because she wants the affirmation she thinks she'll get from others. And the real kicker is: she doesn't know how to do the right thing. It's a sharp (and sometimes unfortunate) contrast with Raoden, who seems to come upon the exact right decision by constant good fortune to the point that it gets kinda annoying. Sarene, on the other hand, doesn't always have a complete picture of the situation and so she does what she perceives to be best at the time - which isn't always what's best in the bigger picture. This, of course, leads to some not-so-positive results, which is how it should be: flawed characters make mistakes and suffer for it and then they get better. I like that Sarene does this. I don't like that her mistakes are more frequent and more directly commented upon than Raoden's. (view spoiler)[His biggest one, in shoving her out of the city through the front gates after Hrathen's potion wears off, really really bothers me because he never even stopped to think about it, especially since it came right after she explained Hrathen's campaign to get Arelon to convert. Actually, I kind of blame Raoden for the whole Eventeo-converts-to-Shu-Dorath thing, because if he'd taken a moment to consider everything that had happened, he probably would have kept Sarene hidden and devised a better strategy. This would be better if it were addressed as a mistake, but... it wasn't. So it niggles at me. (hide spoiler)]
The final word on Sarene, though, is still 'awesome'. She's smart, well-meaning, emotionally believable, and willing to kick ass when it's necessary.

4. Hrathen. He just fascinated me. Actually, as I think about it, I feel that a lot of the reasons that I liked Hrathen were the reasons Inspector Javert is my favorite character in Les Miserables, because they are both noble people doing bad things for all the right reasons, and with little malice in their hearts. I also loved, loved, loved Hrathen's religious conflict, and the way he struggled to balance what he felt his duty as a gyorn was with what he felt was right. He's got a lot of baggage from doing something purely from duty, and I felt that it affected his actions in Arelon to a real and nuanced degree.

It didn't matter that he had acted in the name of the Church, or that he had saved thousands upon thousands of souls. The destruction Hrathen had caused in Duladel ground against his soul like a millstone. People who had trusted him were dead, and an entire society had been cast into chaos.

Though at his introduction I'd expected Hrathen to become the villain of the novel, I was quickly sure that this was not the case. Far be it from the eminently skilled Mr. Sanderson careful Anila your fangirl is showing to create a wholly unsympathetic villain, but even so the degree of attention he paid to Hrathen's conflicts elevated him fairly clearly to, if not protagonist level, at least secondary character on the 'good' side. I don't feel that's too much of a spoiler, since it becomes evident relatively early.
(view spoiler)[My one reservation is what happens with Hrathen at the very end. I liked his actions, and that he turned away from the strict doctrines of Shu-Doreth to do what he felt was right, but I felt that decision was somewhat marred - nay, tainted - by the brief narrative comment explaining that he had been in love with Sarene. Umm... what? First of all, there was very little basis for real love between them. Mutual respect, yes; romantic love, no. (In Homestuck parlance, I'd say that they could have been morails or even kismeses at certain points but never matesprits.) It also felt a little unrealistic given Sarene's previous romantic experience - if she'd gone her whole life finding no man who believed himself in love with her, the idea that two would show up in such short succession is a bit preposterous. (hide spoiler)]

5. Religion. It's always a theme in Sanderson's books, and one that he includes on purpose, which I think is really quite fascinating. Because I've been aware of it as a theme since before I read Warbreaker, so I pay special attention to it. As always, it shines. There's not much to say about the way he handles it, actually, that I haven't raved about in other reviews - particularly for The Well of Ascension - but I do want to mention that even though the religions here feel somewhat more derivative than I'm accustomed to from Sanderson - the schism between Shu-Dorath and Shu-Korath is painfully close to Islam and Christianity - I still found it to be handled tastefully. Now, I'm not religious myself so someone who is might be annoyed at things that I didn't notice, but I feel it bears noting that I, as an atheist, found the religions to be a believably central part of the world without feeling that I was being preached at, which is often a delicate balance and one that few authors even attempt to address as directly, if they do so at all.
There are a few quotes regarding religion that I really, really loved:

"Keseg taught of unity. But what did he mean? Unity of mind, as my people assume? Unity of love, as your priests claim? Or is it the unity of obedience, as the Derethi believe? In the end, I am left to ponder how mankind managed to complicate such a simple concept."

This one stood out to me because it's something I can really sympathize with. Even as an atheist, there's a lot of things about religions that I like - usually those that have to do with it as a social/moralizing force. It feels like Shuden is speaking for me when he comments sadly on the overcomplication of simple, positive ideas.

"Everything happens according to Domi's will, child," Omin answered. "However, I do not think that 'curse' is the right word. At times, Domi sees fit to send disasters upon the world; other times he gives the most innocent of children a deadly disease. These are no more curses than what happened to Elantris - they are simply the workings of the world. All things must progress, and progression is not always a steady incline. Sometimes we must fall, sometimes we will rise - some must be hurt while others have fortune, for that is the only way we can learn to rely on one another. As one is blessed, it is his privilege to help those whose lives are not as easy. Unity comes from strife, child."

Have you ever noticed how no one, ever, wants to answer one key question? I refer, of course, to the common query of the atheist: if a benevolent god exists, why is there so much evil in the world? To which most people will respond with vagaries about 'free will' and 'mysterious ways' and actually not answer the question in a satisfactory manner. Now, I have my issues with this explanation, but not only is it perfectly in-character, at least Sanderson made the effort. That really counts for something. I may not be rushing out to convert after such blinding and faultless logic, but I'm glad to know there are people out there who have put enough thought into their faith to be able to answer such an essential question.


continued in comments because character limits.