I was already reading this book when the Robert Jordan book came out, which explains both why I have skipped my allotment of graphic novels and why I read two books in a row by the same author. At least it isn’t the same series? Anyhow, The Well of Ascension chronicles the continuing adventures of… well, I guess I never talked about the characters in the first Mistborn book, did I? So, anyway, there’s this skaa thieving crew and our heroine, Vin, and they achieved a pretty big victory at the end of book one. And now, as book two opens, they and their noble allies must face new dangers in the form of invading armies, untraceable spies in their inner circle, and a growing certainty that the world is still in the same grave danger that the Hero of Ages was supposed to have defeated a thousand years before.

Sanderson has done a pretty good job of maintaining sense of wonder, by delving more deeply both into mistborn abilities and into the history of the Hero of Ages and the Final Empire. As in the previous book, each chapter starts with an excerpt of writings from a thousand years prior when this chain of events first began. Unlike last time, however, the writings are more or less in order of the story they are telling; it was all I could do not to ignore the book and jump ahead to read the entire ancient record at once, and then come back. All of which to say: see? totally sense of wonder. The mood of the book is by turns ratcheting tension, romantic angst, a little bit of creeping dread, and occasional doses of intense action, all of which build toward a pretty explosive last hundred pages. I was out at dinner Tuesday night and just itched to read the last 20 pages instead of interacting with my companions. I didn’t, but probably only because Skwid was there to answer my minor spoiler and relieve the tension just enough to hold out until I got home.