Favorite Quotes

'Once upon a time, there was a man as great as the gods...... But even the great can tremble with fear. Even the great can Fall.

Mary E. Pearson, Kiss of Deception

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Review: Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

Grade: 4.5 Butterflies
Series: Reckoners #1
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Pages: Hardcover, 384


Ten years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics. But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his wills.

Nobody fights the Epics...nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.

And David wants in. He wants Steelheart - the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David's father. For years, like the Reckoners, David's been studying, and planning - and he has something they need. Not an object, but an experience.

He's seen Steelheart bleed. And he wants revenge.



Brandon Sanderson is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. I have loved every single book I have read by him and this one is no different. From the first page I fell in love! I went into this one thinking it was going to be an epic (pun intended) superhero book and what I got was a mixture of fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, and a survival story. All these elements were used beautifully and weaved together perfectly! 

 This book starts out with a freaking amazing prologue that starts the action immediately. This action transitions into the first chapter and then into the whole book. There are only a few scenes in this book that doesn't have action or didn't end in action. This could be a spoke's person for action packed books. And this isn't the kind of action that isn't needed, all of the action scenes adds to the plot and grabs even more of the readers attention. 

Even without the action, this plot would have been attention gripping. The plot is just so wonderfully written and thick. It's full of mystery, suspense, love, justice, and revenge (and of course action). All of these things combined to make a plot that you couldn't get enough of.  This plot was also full of twists and turns that shocked me and left my jaw hanging. I didn't see any of them coming at all!! When reading it though I never got a "I need to know how this finished" feel but more of a "I don't want this book to end so I'm going to read it as slowly as the plot allows" feel, which is what I always feel when I read a Sanderson book. 

Aside from the amazing plot, the element that really stands out in this book was the world. This world was so interesting and unique that I would've kept reading even if the plot was awful. A world were superheros are real, but they aren't really heroes was just so unique and fascinating! The setting was interesting too, it was kind of dystopian because the government shut down and it was basically a free-for-all.  And of course Brandon Sanderson wrote such amazing world building; you were never info-dumped but he never left out any details. Brandon Sanderson is the King of world building.

The only thing that I didn't love in this book was the characters. This isn't that the characters weren't well written, they were, or that they didn't have depth, they had plenty of that, its just I didn't love them. I didn't really love the main character all that much and all the rest were basically side characters so I couldn't love them very much. That isn't to say I didn't like the side characters, they were fun and great, its just I as a reader didn't get a chance to see as much of them as I would have liked. 

I also couldn't get behind the  romance in this book, which may be a problem considering the whole premise of the next one seems to be around their relationship. This is because It didn't feel like love between David and Megan. David admired Megan and Megan liked David, but that was it. I didn't feel that their relationship was highlighted enough for it to really develop. 

This book was such a outstanding start for this series! The plot was freaking amazing, the world was so addicting to read about, and the writing was brilliant! If you haven't read this one, do so now because it was amazing!! Or wait until the next one is out because the ending killed me!

This book got..

4.5 Butterflies
Beautiful, this is a great book. 


Happy Reading

2 comments:

  1. Omg that prologue killed me! There was much ugly crying >.>


    As for the romance in the second book, I wouldn't worry too much, Sanderson is not an author that lets a romance be the dominant plotline ever and I'm quite expecting for Firefight to go in a surprising direction ;-)

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  2. I really want to read this one! So happy you absolutely loved it. I keep hearing so many amazing things about Sanderson's books, I definitely need to give them a go.

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