{"id":514,"date":"2007-06-17T23:52:45","date_gmt":"2007-06-17T23:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=514"},"modified":"2024-02-11T20:31:46","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T01:31:46","slug":"sanderson_elantris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2007\/06\/sanderson_elantris\/","title":{"rendered":"Sanderson, Brandon: Elantris<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most useful things I’ve learned from the Internet is the phrase Your Mileage May Vary, usually seen as the abbreviation YMMV, which roughly means “tastes differ.” For instance: I thought Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris<\/cite><\/strong> was pretty “enhh,” but YMMV.<\/p>\n

Elantris<\/cite> is a single-volume fantasy, Sanderson’s first. The city of the title used to be called the city of the gods, inhabited by ordinary people transformed at random into white-haired, silver-skinned near-immortals capable of powerful magics. And then it suddenly all went wrong: the transformation apparently turned those chosen into the walking dead, the city crumbled to ruins, and the magic stopped working.<\/p>\n

The society around Elantris collapsed and re-formed into a monarchy, but ten years on, when the book starts, the new government’s stability is threatened by two events: the crown prince is transformed and thrown into Elantris, and a high-ranking priest from a powerful religious empire arrives, intending to convert the country before the empire’s soldiers destroy it. The prince and the priest are two of the point-of-view characters; the third is the prince’s fiancée, a politically-skilled princess from another country who takes an interest in, well, everything. As her companion asks her about halfway through the book, when she raises another issue,<\/p>\n

\n

“My lady, don’t you think you might be overextending yourself? You’ve decided to confront the [priest], liberate the court women from masculine oppression, save Arelon’s economy, and feed Elantris.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That leads into my principal YMMV reaction to this book, the characters. It’s possible that I did the book a bit of a disservice, reading it right after the vivid narrative voices of Mélusine<\/cite> and The Virtu<\/cite><\/a>. Elantris<\/cite> is told in the third person, and I found something about the prose distancing—though it could be a chicken-and-egg thing, the characters and the prose. At any rate, the principal characters did not come alive for me, which left me less than invested in the story. If I’d cared more about the characters—well, for one thing, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the quote above, let alone rolled my eyes at it (the prince was, I thought, a bit too good to be true as well). The priest interested me least, so while I recognized his increased complexities, they came too late in the book to affect me. (The priest was also particularly a victim of the sagging middle that Chad noted<\/a>; the last fifty pages contain more revelations and reversals for him than I can shake a stick at, which come so quickly that I felt they lost their impact.)<\/p>\n

I did like the magic system, and what the prince finds in Elantris and how he responds, but those aren’t enough to carry me through a story. Again, I invoke YMMV, especially in light of the many and glowing blurbs that adorn the paperback.<\/p>\n

I read this as part of my Worldcon homework, as Sanderson is nominated for the Campbell Award. I previously requested Sanderson’s next book, Mistborn<\/cite>, from the library, but I’m not sure now whether I will read it, especially since I still have four novels and fourteen pieces of short fiction to read for the Hugos. Anyone else read these?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most useful things I’ve learned from the Internet is the phrase Your Mileage May Vary, usually seen as the abbreviation YMMV, which roughly means “tastes differ.” For instance: I thought Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris was pretty “enhh,” but YMMV. Elantris is a single-volume fantasy, Sanderson’s first. The city of the title used to … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Sanderson, Brandon: Elantris<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,48,15],"tags":[371],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2007-hugo-nominees","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-sanderson-brandon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2812,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/2812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}