The Hero of Ages

I once tried to read the Mistborn trilogy in print and stalled out a little way into Hero of Ages. I knew that I would want to finish it one day, but eventually it got to the point where I knew I'd need to start at the beginning (I have a terrible memory). When I would occasionally mention that I wanted to finish Hero of Ages before beginning Alloy of Law, friends told me it really wasn't necessary, that The Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages paled in comparison to The Final Empire. They told me that there was about half a book of good story between the two and that I could move on. I'm stubborn though. If you tell me to start in the middle of anything, I'm unlikely to do it. I read The Chronicles of Narnia from The Magician's Nephew even though it's not relevant unless you've already read the other books; I read The Dresden Files from book 1 even though everyone said it gets good in book 4 and Jim Butcher can't pass up a chance to recap.

So now I've read it and I can neither disagree nor agree with the consensus. The story that gets told is going to be inevitably important to the cosmology of this world and was interesting. Unfortunately there was a lot of side-stories and filler that was not ultimately important. There is an entire digression with Spook that would have made a great novella, but could have been left out of the main narrative.

The whole thing just felt unfocused and the tension was ripped out of all of the discovery by the chapter introduction blurbs. I won't spoil who those are coming from, but pretty quickly you will notice that they might as well be coming from your friend who can't hold in spoilers and, during a tense part will say something obnoxious like, "Oooooh! The scene where The Flash discovers that it was Reverse Flash killed his mother. Later he's going to figure out that...... blah blah blah spoiler spoiler spoiler." I didn't need a detached explanation of events nor did I want it.

Grrrr.

But otherwise, probably worth reading if you like Sanderson. Also, hopefully Alloy of Law takes the scale back down from the cosmic.