She had spent months as a knife, held immobile at someone's throat. It was time to cut.
The Well of Ascension
by Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Adult Fantasy
About: Kelsier dreamed of ending the Lord Ruler's thousand year reign and of freeing the skaa; achieving it cost him his life. Now his friends have to keep the Survivor's new kingdom together, but the fall of the Final Empire has created more enemies than even Kelsier's mad band of a crew can handle.
The Good
This is an excellent second book to a trilogy. In the first book, it's mostly about the audacious heist to toppled a thousand year empire. In this one, we discover that actually the hard part of overthrowing the kingdom is what to do after the Lord Ruler is dead. Sanderson throws so many problems at the crew. There isn't just one army, or two armies, but three armies ready to seize the city from them. Then there's the mist acting strangely. The threat of the Deepness coming back. Assassins. A spy in the crew. The obligators disappearing. And a Mistborn with an unhealthy obsession with Vin... I loved how all these issues forced our characters to change and question themselves. Vin and Elend get some great development here. I also found Zane to be a very interesting new character to follow and I totally fell in love with OreSeur and the kandra storyline. The twists overall were great but it was really the hook of finding out who the spy was and what was going to happen with the three armies that kept me flying through the book.
The Bad
Some characters did get left behind. I understand not giving us POVs of Dockson or Ham while Vin is looking for the spy, and I did really like the subtle suspicion put on all of the characters - everyone has changed just that little bit since Kelsier's death and this works very successfully in making us doubt certain characters. When OreSeur likewise has a personality shift, Sanderson is masterful to not make me suspect him. But while all that work is great for the spy tangent, by the time the battle comes around it becomes noticeable how overlooked some crew members were in this book. I still cared when Dockson died, but I didn't feel like he was around enough for me to care as much as I would have if he'd died in book one. I also felt that Spook and Ham were very side-lined when it's those two characters in particular who are the ones most likely to get a laugh out of me. Without Kelsier around as well the humour was a little lacking from the previous book, as was the sense of comradeship. This was far more a Vin/Elend/Zane story with romance becoming more central to the plot than friendship.
The Somewhat Iffy
While I loved the twist that the spy was TenSoon, it didn't make sense to me that he killed OreSeur. The whole point of The Contract is to protect the kandra and yet he willingly kills a fellow kandra in order to fulfil his contract? They can't kill humans or cause humans to die, but they can kill other kandra? Why wouldn't they forbid killing their own kind if The Contract is about protecting their species?
I also found it both funny and frustrating that Vin was so slow to focus on the spy problem. She waits some time before using her Allomancy to eliminate all the crewmembers who have powers, something that would have been very easy for her to do as soon as she knows that's a way to find the spy.
Overall
Everything that's great about fantasy is in these pages. The stakes climb higher and higher, the character really go through a journey, the world is full of strange creatures and murky political alliances, and of course, the magic system creates so much intrigue. More mysteries and epic-ness is sure to follow in book three...
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