Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn is a great piece of Dune-esque fiction with fantastic world building, a very original and interesting hard magic system that is simple enough on the surface but poses near limitless fascinating combinatorial possibilities, plenty of mystery, and a great cast of characters whom I would absolutely love to hang out with warmly bantering at a safe house kitchen after a successful gig. This was an integral part to the story too, which I always love, as it is often these moments that you can most relate to in any world - no matter how magical - and where often all the relationships between characters, but also their internal reflection, goals, hopes, dreams, as well as their successes and failures with respect to them are best expressed.

I really enjoyed the parallels to Dune placed in a fantasy world instead of sci-fi (for now from what I’ve heard is to come), which could be seen in an evil empire mining and controlling the supply of a precious, powerful metal, that gives its user mental and physical abilities that make them momentarily near invincible, and Kelsier almost becoming a Paul-like messianic figure through deliberate manipulation of the masses’ religious impulses, which calls you to start questioning his motives and wonder whether, similarly to Dune, the upraising against the empire is only about replacing one tyrant with another. The key differences between Paul and Kelsier are, however, that he deliberately dies a martyr, sparking the flame of rebellion in the hearts of the thoroughly oppressed skaa who many thought entirely incapable of it, before we get to know which it would have been would he have lived, and his way of showing defiance was through deliberately smiling through anything and everything with a big but accommodating, trusting and charming personality that made him a natural leader people wanted to follow just for who he was alone.

Mistborn deals with themes of tyranny, oppression and class differences in terms of their basis and morality of their representatives in a brutal, dystopian fantasy world with people who almost have their very souls beaten out of them apart from only a handful few in the equally brutal underground at the heart of the corrupt empire. However, the central themes and my personal takeaways from the book revolve around trust, loyalty, and whether to proactively choose believe in the existence of these attributes even at the risk of being betrayed, but with the reward of living a much more meaningful life. I certainly think so. You shouldn’t be too naïve, but is a life in which you can never trust anyone worth living in the first place? Might as well risk it and choose the world in which virtue exists and exemplify it yourself. This way you can bring it about yourself or die trying, either of which is probably preferable to living in a world where there is truly nobody worth trusting.

The book works really well as a standalone, but sets up a world full of mysteries and possibilities much larger than what could ever fit into a single book, and so I am really looking forward to the next ones too. For some reason my immersion was not quite as deep this time despite everything being perfect on paper, but I feel that has a lot more to do with my own current headspace rather than the book itself. Would highly recommend to any fans of fantasy, heists, romance, thrillers, Dune, or just impressive world building and coming-of-age character stories in general!