Alloy of Law (Mistborn 4)
12 May 2022
✍️ Written by: Brandon Sanderson
🏷 Genre: Sci-fi / fantasy
🗓 Published: 08th Nov 2011
📄 Pages: 354
🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ / 3 stars
Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds.
After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs.
I was struggling between giving this 2 and 3 stars. While I really enjoyed the original Mistborn trilogy, but Alloy of Law failed to captivate me in the same way.
One thing that I struggled with throughout the book was the complexity of the whole Allomancy vs Feruchamy thing. In the original Mistborn trilogy Allomancy and Feruchamy are distinctly different and there’s only a handful of metals to track.
Now there seems to be many more metals and combining Allomancy with Feruchamy made things confusing for me.
I thought I’d hate the use of guns with Allomancy in this book, and the inevitable moving of bullets mid-flight. Sanderson wrote it will well though, making the bullets a key part of the story.
My thoughts
I ended up going with 3 stars, because in true Sanderson fashion, the ending is full of action and really did captivate me. Overall I enjoyed the book and it is worth a read. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by Sanderson’s other books and I’m being overly harsh with my rating.
I’ve been reading a lot of Sanderson lately, so I’m torn about whether or not to continue this second trilogy in the Mistborn saga, or have a break and reas something different.