Warbreaker

Title: Warbreaker

Author: Brandon Sanderson

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 676 Pages

Synopsis:

Warbreaker is the story of two sisters, who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn’t like his job, and the immortal who’s still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago.

Their world is one in which those who die in glory return as gods to live confined to a pantheon in Hallandren’s capital city and where a power known as BioChromatic magic is based on an essence known as breath that can only be collected one unit at a time from individual people.

By using breath and drawing upon the color in everyday objects, all manner of miracles and mischief can be accomplished. It will take considerable quantities of each to resolve all the challenges facing Vivenna and Siri, princesses of Idris; Susebron the God King; Lightsong, reluctant god of bravery, and mysterious Vasher, the Warbreaker.

(from Goodreads)

My Thoughts:

Warbreaker is a stand-alone Fantasy novel by Brandon Sanderson. This is another Cosmere novel taking place in another world, where Siri has to marry the mysterious God-King, and meanwhile her sister Vivenna is trying to rescue her and well shit happens after that.

There’s quite a few things I love about this book! Let’s start with the characters. I think Brandon Sanderson has two characters whose character concepts I just love, and I think it’s his best character concepts from Brandon that I’ve seen yet. I love the character concept for Lightsong. He’s a God, but he doesn’t believe that he is really a God. And I just love that idea for a character. Also the idea of Nightblood, a sentient sword that was created to destroy all evil, but he has no concept of what evil is. I love that idea.

I also really like the character development that we get in Vivenna, Siri and Lightsong gets in this book. Lightsong and Vivenna both learn more about who they are and that actions are more important then your intentions. While Siri grows to become a capable politician.

As for the plot, I enjoyed the politics that went on in this novel. This book wasn’t the most action packed compared to some of Brandon Sanderson’s other novels, but I’m actually okay with that. I also kind of like how Brandon Sanderson subverted your expectations of “the party”. Whenever there is “the party” in a Fantasy novel, there usually the good guys, or the main cast of characters. For the first half of the book, it looked like the usual “party”, until the second half of the book where it’s revealed that the “party” is actually the bad guys, and Vivenna realizes to her horror that she’s been helping the bad guys the whole time. That’s actually not a bad subversion of “the party” trope. For the record “the party” trope is one of my favourite Fantasy tropes and I like how Brandon subverted that trope in this novel.

As for the worldbuilding and lore, I really like the lore that we got here. It was definitely a step up from Elantris. It’s worldbuilding was very relevant to the plot. And Brandon did it again with making an interesting, complicated but still a magic system that does make sense. It felt very fleshed out. Brandon is truly a mastermind when it comes to his magic systems.

I suppose my biggest criticism of Warbreaker is that… I kept comparing this book to Elantris (Brandon Sanderson’s first book). I found that both of these books are so similar: 1) Both books have Princesses that must marry someone they don’t know for politics. 2) They travel to a land far away from home. 3) They also marry to try and keep a treaty and to try and avoid a war. 4) Once the Princess arrives they get distracted by the politics. I just couldn’t help myself but compare this book to Elantris. It kind of feels like Brandon Sanderson created this book just to be a remake of Elantris.

I also kind of felt like the ending was kind of rushed and quite a bit of it (such as the Lifeless Army attacking) happened off-screen for some reason. I kind of wanted a bit more with the ending.

Overall, Warbreaker is still a great stand-alone Fantasy Novel. And even though I did compare this to Elantris quite a bit, I think Warbreaker definitely is the better novel. This is a book with a great magic system, political intrigue and great characters to follow. If you want to get into the Cosmere or just want to read a stand-alone Fantasy Novel, this is a great choice to read.

Rating: