the one I hand to people. always this one. never start them on the big one, TRUST ME

this is my gateway drug book. if someone says they want to try fantasy and they have never read any, I give them this, not the doorstop, because this one is 600-odd pages and it teaches you how to read the guy at the same time as it tells you a story. very generous book. thinks about the reader.

the pitch is basically: what if the Chosen One tried to overthrow the dark lord a thousand years ago AND LOST, and now it is a thousand years later and everything is ash and the sky is wrong. and then the actual book is a heist. it is a heist! a crew gets assembled in a warehouse and they sit around a table and they plan a job. I did not know you were allowed to do that in epic fantasy.

genuinely the crew planning scenes — my favourite part of the whole thing, and I have thought about this a lot — work because it is basically a party in a co-op game. Kelsier is the guy who has already read the wiki. Ham is the guy asking philosophy questions in voice chat while everyone else is trying to do the objective. Breeze is the one who does not want to do any work. this is a real dynamic and it is why the book feels alive when a lot of fantasy feels like people delivering exposition at each other.

the magic. right. so you eat metals and burn them for powers and every metal does exactly one thing, and there is a chart, and I love the chart, I have opinions about the chart. steel and iron are Push and Pull and the way he uses them for movement is basically a grappling hook traversal system and it is the most fun action writing I have read. it is Just Cause. it is Sekiro. the fight choreography is legible which sounds like faint praise but go and read any other epic fantasy fight and try to tell me where anybody is standing. can you? no. nobody can.

ok things that are not perfect. Vin's arc in the middle sags a bit, there is a stretch of ballgown chapters where she is learning to be a noblewoman and I skimmed them on my first read and then on the reread realised they are actually load bearing so that's on me. the dialogue is not what anyone would call literary. characters explain their feelings out loud in complete sentences. Priyesh says the prose is functional and I always argue but he is not exactly wrong, it is just that I want the plot machine and he wants sentences.

minor spoiler but the thing that happens two thirds of the way through, the thing in the square, I have now watched four separate people in my life reach that page and I have never once been disappointed by the reaction.

my mum read this. my MUM. she does not read fantasy, she reads crime novels about detectives with drink problems, and she finished it in a week and asked me for the next one. that is the whole review really. ten.