Book Review: Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson

Genre: Fantasy
Date Published: June 2009
Publisher: Tor Books
# Of Pages/Listening Time: 592 pages/25 hours

Goodreads | Audible

Synopsis: Warbreaker is the story of two sisters who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn't like his job, and the immortal who's still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago.
Their world is one in which those who die in glory return as gods to live confined to a pantheon in Hallandren's capital city and where a power known as BioChromatic magic is based on an essence known as breath that can only be collected one unit at a time from individual people.
By using breath and drawing upon the color in everyday objects, all manner of miracles and mischief can be accomplished. It will take considerable quantities of each to resolve all the challenges facing Vivenna and Siri, princesses of Idris; Susebron the God King; Lightsong, reluctant god of bravery; and mysterious Vasher, the Warbreaker.

My Rating:

 ★★★★

.....For being a really good and creative read

My Thoughts:

I enjoyed this read, but unfortunately I don't think this was Sanderson's best work.

As always, I loved the world-building (how does Sanderson come up with all this stuff?!). The characters were also very well done, with all of them containing at least some depth, and strong, distinctive personality traits.

The problem was the pace of the story. I had a really hard time getting into the plot, and it wasn't until about 2/3 of the way in that things started to get more exciting and interesting for me. (Although, admittedly the last Sanderson novels I read before this one were the Mistborn Universe novels, which had some sort of action happening in every chapter, so I might have unconsciously expected this novel to do the same thing.) This story was definitely a slow build that suddenly explodes into chaos at the very end.

I'm still really glad I read this, though. I did enjoy it as a whole, and there are some characters (and objects) in this book that show up in other Cosmere books (*cough cough* Stormlight Archive!), so I'm glad I was able to read about this characters and find out who they were and how they fit into things.

Definitely a must-read if you're trying to find Easter Eggs in all of the Cosmere books.