Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson is a Young Adult fantasy novel about a young street urchin, Vin, who discovers that she is a rare magic user. She gets recruited by Kelsier, the charismatic leader of a band of thieves for the heist of the millennium - topple the evil overlord. In this book the villain already won and has been ruling the planet with terribleness for over a thousand years.

The book really has two protagonists. We stick with Vin’s perspective through most of the book, but Kelsier seems to be the actual focus with Vin serving more as observer and audience stand-in. Vin, being a reclusive street urchin, needs the world explained to her. Everyone else is forgettable. It’s a heist story first and foremost in an Ocean’s Eleven kind of way. The camaraderie was pretty good between the other characters, but none really stood out except in their magic power and chosen profession. Everyone talked the same and without the names of the speakers I couldn’t tell you who was who.

The obvious high part of the book was the magic system. By ingesting and then “burning” miniscule amounts of certain metals you can do any number of things like pushing or pulling metal and even influencing others’ emotions. It was grounded and believable. I would have liked more examples of the magic system influencing the world and the way people lived their lives. For example I found it odd that only special guards avoided metal. You would think in a world where any worn metal can be used against you, every soldier and footpad would actively avoid it. It did make for some cool fight scenes though with the good guys pushing and pulling bad guys around by their armor and jumping off them and swinging them around.

I was on the fence about this book in the beginning. The first half felt like the script of a shonen anime. It felt like Sanderson was trying so hard to make Kelsier cool. The fight scenes had me rolling my eyes as they came off at times try-hard and edge lordy. The ending though was awesome and I couldn’t put the book down in the last third. More questions were raised during the climatic showdown and it made me at least curious to see where it goes from here. Because of the ending I will eventually pick up the sequel as I want to see where the story goes.