Book Review: The Alloy of Law (A Mistborn Novel)

The Mistborn trilogy is neither Brandon Sanderson’s first nor hbest-known work, but it is the series that got him into the big time.  It was, after all, based on this work that Robert Jordan’s widow chose Sanderson to finish the Wheel of Time (WoT) series, and it seems that a legion of Jordan’s fans have since discovered Sanderson as a powerful author in his own right.  That’s certainly how I discovered him; I dove into Mistborn: The Final Empire after learning about Sanderson’s then-impending work on WoT because I wanted to see what the fuss was about.  And I loved Mistborn right from jump.  At this point, it’s fair to say that I’m more excited forA Memory of Light because it’s a Brandon Sanderson book than I am because it’s finishing up the WoT.

With all of that said, I wasn’t super-fired-up when I saw that Sanderson had returned to the Mistborn world with The Alloy of Law (AoL).  For one thing, I don’t read Westerns, and based on its cover and the reviews I’d read on Amazon, AoL looked like a Western, albeit one with elements of Fantasy.  On top of that, I thought that Mistborn: The Hero of Ages ended the series on the right note.  It didn’t seem to me like there was much room to grow the story without stretching its fabric all out of whack, and that feeling that only increased when I read on Sanderson’s blog that he basically wrote the book solely as a means of getting away from MoL and from his new mega-epic The Stormlight Archives books.  Hey, I really liked The Stormlight Archives!  I didn’t need stupid Brandon Sanderson to take time away from it to write a freakin’ Western!

Thankfully, AoL was NOTHING like I thought it was gonna be.  First off, the book is NOT a Western.  It’s much more of a steampunk urban fantasy starring Wyatt Earp.  Imagine Earp inheriting the ruins of the Vanderbilt fortune in 1897, right after Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ne’er-do-well son drinks most of that massive fortune away.  Earp then has to come back east to New York City—a city at the cusp of the electrical portion of the Industrial Revolution—to rebuild his family’s fortune just as a daring series of high-profile robberies threatens to upend the City’s social structure.  That’s basically what’s going on in The Alloy of Law, save of course that our hero is an Allomancer/Feruchemist.

If that sounds like a lot, well, it is.  Where most Westerns are frighteningly straightforward and linear, AoL is delightfully complex and layered.  The hero struggles to be heroic, the love interest isn’t, and the dumb side-kick is anything but dumb.  Moreover, as in the second Mistborn book, The Well of Ascension, Sanderson uses AoL to expand the Mistborn universe exponentially, not only introducing a reimagined future/past alternate reality but also hinting at more potential exponential expansions.  The story itself is small—for example, the end of the world is not at stake—but the plot is well-crafted, and the action is riveting.  Moreover, by foregoing the end-of-the-world consequences, Sanderson is able to craft a uniquely personal tale.  There are hints of more, but in the end, this is a book about one man’s quest to save his family’s fortune and good name.  That’s more than enough, believe me.

Needless to say, I loved this book.  Not only because it was a well-written but uniquely unconventional adventure story, but also because it consistently hinted at more and more and more.  After reading The Alloy of Law, I’m actively excited about the Mistborn series again.  Because it’s NOT a continuation of what’s come before.  It’s instead something completely different that nevertheless makes use of the familiar—and that’s what makes it work so well.