I and my copy of this book have been through a lot together. I carried it in my backpack for a couple of months, accidentally causing it water damage, carving the edges of the pages with different items bouncing around the backpack and staining a part of it yellow with a leaky food container while personally going through the greatest personal turmoil I have ever experienced, essentially upending my entire life and plans in the midst of also writing and finishing my Bachelor’s Thesis and launching not one but two products at my newly started startup job.

That being said, like my copy of the book, my memories of it might be a bit colored by the circumstances. However, I vividly remember being immediately invested in the story and fascinated by the world from the moment I opened the book. I had just completed my Cosmere collection by purchasing all the remaining books I did not yet have and when consulting my friend on what to read next and in which order, I was surprised to hear that he did not consider Elantris that important or good.

I figured that I will have to read it at one point or another either way, so might as well proceed chronologically with the rest of the books. After reading the first few chapters, I had to text him that what on Earth did he mean by it not being that great as it was very quickly shaping up to be one of my favorites. I doubt that the concept can be entirely new, but starting your book by the protagonist being taken by a mysterious force that makes him close to immortal, but without the ability to heal, and throwing him into a once-magical, but now abandoned and hostile city to survive in the midst of people who have literally lost their minds from the accumulation of physical pain and suffering over every unhealing cut, scratch, bruise and blister for years, is quite an attention grabber. When something so simple as stubbing your toe might be the thing to push you over the line to indefinite madness, the stakes for everyday life, let alone for any kind of confrontation, are greatly elevated.

Add the mystery of lost magic, political intrigue, almost orthogonally opposite religions and a great cast of memorable characters with interesting internal struggles and surprising flaws to the mix and you have a pretty perfect blend of ingredients for the makings of an epic. It only kept getting better the further I read and it provided a fascinating, immersive world to occasionally jump into for a much needed escape from the current one. Everything is good now, but the roller coaster of my life could not be matched by the book, even though it did have some good twists and turns too.

This is where I now understand the viewpoint of my friend as well. The book ended rather abruptly and many of the mysteries were not resolved in the most satisfying ways for me. There were so many fascinating character plots, but few of them were resolved. This could be interpreted favorably as supporting some of the books themes relating to the nature of time and its meaningful usage along with abrupt changes and unpredictability of both people and nature, but to me it still felt incomplete, leaving me wanting for more.

Regardless, Elantris is a great story, full of fascinating characters full of character and I grew attached to many of them. They were complex and competent, and the real meat of the book was to be found in their various multidimensional, multipolar relationships ranging all the way from raging hostility to adorable wholesomeness with a lot of witful banter and adversarial political maneuvering in between, which constituted the majority of plot points. One thing that really struck me was how many really healthy relationships were portrayed. There were of course information asymmetries but the good guys really got along well and presented a largely uniform front against the external adversaries, which was, frankly, very refreshing to see and did not diminish anything one bit. The story emerging from this web of relationships is refreshingly human despite the surprisingly few, carefully spread out fantasy elements, in its exploration of themes such as moral duty, leadership, different forms of strength, unconditional kindness and goodness, building something out of nothing, optimism versus pessimism, competition versus collaboration, the purposes and roles of faith and suffering, and the meaning of existence.

If any of the abovementioned themes - all of which I am personally absolutely fascinated with - strikes a chord, definitely give Elantris a read! It still works very well for avid fantasy readers, but is almost even more for the philosophically inclined drama enjoyers, so even if the genre might generally appear to you as foreign or uninteresting, you might enjoy the story and the characters nevertheless. It is a great standalone, but also kicks off the entire Cosmere, which I highly recommend to explore further afterwards, though no direct, full sequel exists, yet at least.