the system is fine, the sentences aren't

someone at work spent four months telling me to read this so i read it, & my position afterwards is that the magic system is good and the prose is not.

allomancy first, since it's the reason to bother. the rules are stated early, they're finite, and they're obeyed. burn steel, push on metal. burn iron, pull. the pushes behave like vectors and relative mass matters, so a coin goes flying and a man doesn't, unless he's anchored, in which case he does. anchoring is never defined tightly and every awkward case in the book hides inside it.

the metals table at the back is exactly what i want from a book like this. sixteen entries, four groupings, physical / mental / enhancement / temporal, and the plot never uses anything that isn't on the table. i went back and checked the two big set pieces against it afterwards and they're clean. sanderson doesn't cheat. that is rarer than it should be.

the setting does a lot without stopping to explain itself, which i appreciated. ash falling, mists at night, brown plants, and nobody comments on any of it because why would they. the reveal about why the sky is like that arrives late and is better than the plot it's bolted to. i'd have read a book that was only that.

the sentences, though. functional at best and often not that. every emotional beat gets announced twice, once by the narrator and once by a character restating it in dialogue immediately after. vin thinks something, says it, then breeze explains it back to her. by the midpoint i was reading in a skim i don't like doing.

small technical complaint: the physical consequences of a push are inconsistent between fights. sometimes it throws vin across a courtyard, sometimes it just moves the coin. the anchoring rule covers this in principle. in practice which one happens is decided by what the scene wants.

the heist structure works for a good long stretch and then gets quietly abandoned for a war plot, which is a shame, because the crew scenes are the best character writing here. kelsier is a real character. breeze & ham are one character split in half. sazed i liked, and his catalogue of dead religions is a nice piece of worldbuilding that mostly sits there as a list.

the ending is foreshadowed properly and i'll give it full credit for that. the clue is placed early and plainly, i went back and found it, and it was where it should have been.

what i can't get past is that none of the prose rewards attention. with a system specified this carefully you'd want the sentences to be precise too, and instead they're wallpaper. i finished it. i'm not reading the next two. the person at work has stopped asking.