Roy Tang

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished Well of Ascension only two days after finishing The Final Empire. I think I enjoyed it a bit less than the first book - mainly because there’s a lot of self-doubt here among the protagonists, a lot of paragraphs of “why am i doing this? I’m not good enough, etc”. The plot also takes longer to solidify. Unlike the first book where they had a very solid objective until the end (the downfall of the Final Empire), the protagonists spend most of this book running in circles trying to figure out what they should do.

That being said, I did read through the book in two days, so I still found it compelling. Sanderson expands upon the worldbuilding, mythos and systems from the first book. The first book already had a theme of hopelessness around it, but the second book goes even darker. And as you can expect for the second book of a trilogy, the ending doesn’t leave our heroes or the world in a very good spot. Looking forward to the final book.

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