I was a little surprised when, while searching through the rubbish heaps, I ran across a story with a distinctly familiar name attached to it.
Brandon Sanderson is one of those success stories. You know, the sort that you wish you were but never will be. He has a few stories under his belt, some of which I read and enjoyed, so it’s with no little respect that I decided to review this story.
Mister Sanderson’s wisdom isn’t infallible, it seems, because for some reason he decided to take a perfectly alright story and tack it onto Wattpad. You plebs clearly don’t deserve to read his junk, yet he saw fit to post it here anyway.
Oh well. Life goes on.
Warbreaker is a story about... well a lot of things.
If you’re ever looking for good fantasy written in a more modern prose, you can do little worse than Sanderson. He also has some of the most interesting magics out there. Systems that are at the same time creative and complex, while also being easy to imagine and exploit. Warbreaker’s colour-based magic is just one example.
I’d love to sing praise about this story, but knowing who wrote it and what he is capable of makes me want to set this at a higher standard. Basically, it’s not perfect.
Two issues jump off the screen. First, the sentence structure is hella complicated. Thrice, in the first chapter alone, I had to re-read entire paragraphs to decipher what the heck it was that Sanderson was trying to say. Dozens of lines are delivered with strange formats and structures, all pushing the limit of how strange a sentence can be. Protip: if you need more than one semi-colon to keep a sentence afloat, it ain’t good.
Second, is the info dumping. Now, I do love Sanderson’s world (s), but by Jove does he love dropping an anvil’s worth of information* on his reader’s head. Far more time than necessary is spent waxing on about little, unimportant details. Sure, some flavour text is nice, and I can be accused of committing the same crime, but there is a limit.
This isn’t that glaring of an issue. Most readers are smart enough folk, and they can manage to take in a decent chunk of data in one fell swoop. That slow writing can kick the shin’s of the stories pace, turning it into a chore to read.
I, even I, feel as though I’m being unfair to this story. It is not bad. In fact, it’s bloody well excellent. Does this story suck? Nope, not at all. It has the professional polish of a published work (cause it is). Yet, if you look hard enough, you’ll still find typos and mistakes in it (found two in the first chapter, and I wasn’t looking for them).
This is proof positive, I think, that even the best of us aren’t perfect. Only me.
Keep warm, stay cool.
*An anvil of information is the equivalent of one 1990’s [eight] edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. This unit was measured by a team of over a hundred fictional word-scientists dredged up from the deepest fathom’s of my ability to bullshit.
