Defiant

I am beginning to tire of Brandon Sanderson.

In hindsight, this is a very successful series. Sanderson is an exceptional science fantasy/space opera author - in fact, other than this one, I'm not sure there's any sci-fi book of his I haven't liked. Starsight remains my favorite book of his for its incredible world building and plot handling. And I am glad his Cosmere series is headed in that direction, because the four fantasy books he released this year were some of his worst. The cringiest aspects of Sanderson's writing came to the fore in all of those novels.

Defiant avoids all those habits. But for all that it continues developing Sanderson's best world to date, it is just not a very well-executed novel. Every twist and plot device seems to arrive two chapters too late. I felt “oh, finally,” or “oh, that happened,” rather than “wow!” or shock or sadness or fear.

The beginning of the book was glacial. I wonder if the YA genre limits Sanderson's ability to establish a rotation between viewpoints the way he does in his adult novels (not that there's really much content difference!) When that rotation shows up at the end to facilitate the avalanche, it was confusing and inconsistent. Some of the viewpoints were from characters we haven't seen in 3 books - it felt like you had to have read the Skyward Flight spinoff novellas to really understand what was going on inside these characters' minds.

There were some really iconic moments in this one, flashes of the best of Sanderson, and the general scope of the plot was predictable but fulfilling. It actually disappoints me a little that the problem was not overindulgence, but a fundamental flaw in the way things worked out at the end.

I love this universe and I hope this is the first of Sanderson's works to be adapted. Despite Defiant's execution not really working, I think the strength of the first two makes this his best series and I'm glad he is letting some other authors play around in it. It seems perfect for that sort of thing.