Warbreaker

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson is definitely a novel written by an author with Tolkien roots, but with a desire to forge new paths out of the fantasy mold.  It's evident that many of the novel's conventions, such as the switch from a more traditional type of magic to something called BioChromatic Breath, are attempts to breathe new life (see what I did there?) into the genre. 

Magic isn't the only thing that's altered in Sanderson's world either, there is a whole new world to explore with politics, religion, and even controllable zombie armies that play a big part in the overall plot of the story.  That being said, not all of these ideas are fully realized and some of them are even too tediously explained.  Too much time is used developing the cheesy, though well thought out magic system, and hardly any time is used fleshing out the political system and even some of the pivotal characters in the story are underdeveloped.

With all of the different games, movies, media, and even changes in how we live our lives it's obvious that author's such as Sanderson would step up and write a novel heavily influenced by everything around him/her.  The inclusion of many of these new takes and additions are obviously the product of an author living in our current generation.  Many of these changes turn out to be refreshing, such as the use of literal zombie armies to wage war and though the magic system is gimmicky, it is nice to see a different take on magic (Though I haven't come close to tiring of Tolkien).  One thing about the writing that seemed a bit off is the dialogue of the characters was very much the vernacular of modern people, yet the world in the novel seemed more like a mix between medieval european and greek cultures.  The speech could have been much more thought out just as some of the other characteristics of the world had been and this change would have brought a significant change to the reader's emersion into Warbreaker.

It's intriguing that the book is capable of being a mediocre stand alone piece of fiction, but definitely seems like it would work better as a set of books. This way a lot of this book's holes could be filled in, it would even be nice to see this done with a prequel first, and then followed by a sequel to Warbreaker.  I know when I first started reading it, I thought I had skipped a book or something because right from the beginning you're thrown into a political struggle between two powers that you have no previous knowledge about.

Sanderson is obviously a skilled writer, much of the novel is pretty well written especially the action/fight sequences and most of the main characters aside from a few were pretty well developed.  The book dragged on through probably eighty-five percent of the story with a few interesting parts, I seemed to like following LightSong's parts, but the end of the book was excellent with more action and plot bending than I knew what to do with.  I've been told that this isn't the best example of his work so I'm thinking about reading some of his other novels.  I'm interested to see where our current generation is taking the fantasy genre, but Warbreaker just had a few things that just didn't play to my personal tastes.

- Dan