Surprisingly good – Steelheart review!

Title: Steelheart (the reckoners #1).

Author: Brandon Sanderson.

Format: Hardcover (library).

Publisher: Delacorte press.

Page count: 384.

Release day: September 24^th 2013.

Genre: YA, fantasy.

Rating: 3.5 stars.

What is it about? (Summary from GoodReads)

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.

Rating:

Characters: 6/10

Atmosphere: 7/10

Writing: 8/10

Plot: 6/10

Intrigue: 7/10

Logic: 6/10

Enjoyment: 7/10

Average: 6.7 (which means 3 stars!)

My thoughts:

I went into this book knowing that it would be very different from the other works that I’ve read from Sanderson. And that was a good thing, if I would have read this book, expecting something like The final empire, I would have been disappointed.

Of course this is YA, while all the other works I read from him is adult. Is this the best work that I have read from Sanderson, did I enjoy my time reading this, definitely!

This is a book about some people having superpowers (epics), who obviously run the world, and  the rest of the people who don’t have powers, and follow these powerful people.

Our main character, David, saw his father being killed by Steelheart, the Epic who is ruling the world. So David needs revenge, and spends 10 years planning how to get to this invincible Epic. But David saw him bleed and knows Steelheart has a weakness, he just doesn’t know what. So in this book he teams up with rebels, to try and take Steelheart down.

David was an okay character, a bit unrealistic at times. Every time something went wrong and the rebels had to improvise, he came up with something and it worked out even better?! My favourite side character was Cody, I really enjoyed his humour. Talking about humour, I feel like Sanderson tried a bit too hard to make David funny, but for me it didn’t work. He kept making these metaphors that didn’t make sense, and then he would have to explain it, and I just did not think that was funny. And I kinda skipped over those paragraphs.

The world was really good though! I really liked how these superpowers were implemented in the world. It was always dark because of one of the Epics, Steelheart made the whole world of steel, just because! And there were also lots of less powerful Epics, and I really liked to learn the extend of these powers!

This book was so action-packed, there was barely any break. But personally I quite enjoyed this! Yes there was a lot of action, but I don’t think it was overdone! I really liked every step that was taken to beat Steelheart. And there were definitely some twists that I did not see coming at all!

I don’t know what to say more about this book. This did not have the best characters, but the plot was action-packed and I kept wanting to continue. So I definitely recommend this if you want an easy action-packed fantasy book. Just don’t expect it to be up there with Mistborn and Warbreaker!

Have you read this book? What did you think?