Steelheart Book Review

Steelheart

Brandon Sanderson

Delacorte Press (September 24, 2013)

5/5 Stars

Summary for you, “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 will.
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.” Amazon.com

 

        Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson is one of the most original books I’ve read this year.  The whole superhero thing might be wearing thin considering how many authors in the last couple of years have embraced it.  But superheroes, dystopian futures, and love stories rarely seem to mix that well together.  Brandon Sanderson didn’t seem to have any trouble.  The fast paced story drives you along making the act of stopping and putting the book down an act of Epic proportion all in itself.  I loved the way the book was paced and the characters, while in some cases a little too shallow; but never so that you didn’t care about them or want to know more.  There certainly was a general lack of descriptive detail to a lot of his world building of Newcago.  But in the end the setting was really only the back drop for the events of the book and nothing more.  It was believable enough and perhaps more description would have slowed down the pace of the story too much.  I’m not sure, but Brandon Sanderson makes this masterful work look easy.  I can’t wait to read the next book.  And see what the continuing adventurers of the Reckoners are going to look like, and of course, what happens with Firefight(no spoilers….)