The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
This novel picks up where the first one left off, with the band of scoundrels who have managed to take over the empire trying to hold onto their victory. Elend Venture has taken over as king, but he’s more of an idealist and a scholar and is having trouble asserting his leadership. Meanwhile Vin has been fighting off assassins and contemplating whether or not she is the fabled hero of ages who will gain the ability to fix the world and make plants green again.
I’d say the mix of this book is about 60% politics and war, 20% prophecy and the rest friendship and romance. Vin’s relationship to Elend is central to this book. They do love each other but they are also struggling to find themselves. Elend proposed to Vin in the previous book and she said no, because she doesn’t think of herself as the kind of person who can be his queen. Meanwhile, Vin has met another mistborn named Zane which adds a lot of tension. Will Zane kill her? Will she kill Zane? Can she kill Zane? Will she and Zane fall in love? Zane hears a voice in his head which tells him to kill people (everyone but Vin) and the reader knows, as Zane does not, that the voice is a real thing. Elend and Vin also see a figure made of mist, whom the reader also knows is a real thing. Is it the same thing as Zane’s voice? Is it the mysterious adversary known as “the deepness?” Some of the mysteries linger until the end of the book, and some are left for the next book in the series.
There’s a lot of action and violence in this book. Vin is basically an assassin. It’s fun to be with her as she swoops around and kills bad guys, though there were a few scenes where the action dragged on too long. I also loved Elend’s struggles with his Ministry, and felt his frustration when they betrayed him. This book introduces two new characters, Tindrel and Oreana (I’m guessing on the spelling). Tindrel is a keeper, like Sezed, and sees it as her duty to teach Elend how to be a king. Oreana is a teenage noblewoman, the daughter of one of Elend’s biggest enemies. That helps mitigate, to some extent, my complaints about the first book, namely that there aren’t enough women. It still skews male. It’s not just that this book’s plot has little place for anyone who doesn’t have magic powers or an army, it’s that the women still seem absent. The soldiers are all men. The allomancers who attempt assassinations are all men. Even the refugees seem to be mostly men, albeit ones too old or too young to fight, despite the conscription needs of multiple armies. I think there was one female servant mentioned. It was like an episode of The Smurfs, or a Tolkien novel, which was frustrating because Sanderson is so realistic in so many other areas yet doesn’t seem to understand basic math. If the men are conscripted to become soldiers, and the soldiers mostly die, the remaining people are going to be mostly women. I wanted to see more heroic women, women without armies or magic powers, showing courage and fortitude, as they do in real life when their country is torn apart by war. Most of the time I could ignore this (Tindrel helped), and I could just focus on Vin, but there was a point in many books where one tries to imagine oneself in the world, and this world has no place for women except off screen.
But still, it was a fun and exciting adventure and I loved how Sanderson played around with prophecy and religion. I loved how, just when you think you knew how the world worked, things got shifted around. I’ve already started the next book in the series because I can’t wait to find out how it ends.
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