Epic ending for a masterfully crafted trilogy!

Sanderson strikes the perfect balance of promise, payoff and mystery for a satisfying ending of an epic arc with great growth, clever powerscaling and fascinating twists, while still leaving the door open for way more to come. With that, I cannot wait to begin reading the second era.

A Hero of Ages picks up from (where) Well of Ascension left off and extrapolates and expands on all of its themes much further. Elend’s arc is particularly brilliant, where first in Well of Ascension he must learn to be a strong, decisive and emblematic leader and confront the realities of his idealism clashing with the world where he is severely underpowered, while now he must remember his original purpose to not abuse his substantial newfound power. Now most emphasis is on the redeemability and hypocrisy of people, whether ends justify means, and what exactly does it mean to trust other people, species, higher powers and yourself.

This book has the largest cast of characters and most diverse points of view, none of which felt any less exciting or interesting than the others. Everyone is dealing with a unique set of existential issues, all of which comes together in the end in a cataclysmic climax, which reminds me of Dan Carlin’s term for people bringing about historical resets; the historical arsonists, many flavors of which are explored in the book’s magical setting too. What I particularly liked about it, however, was that the world was finally remolded to be better from the brink of an apocalypse of suffocation by a scholar with literally all of the accumulated human knowledge up until that point as the more typical strong protagonist simply could not do it without making everything worse due to the sheer complexity of the endeavor. Were this ever be made into a movie, it would have to have some of the craziest visuals known to man. I was not ready for the incredible brutality, barrenness and beauty I was asked to imagine before reading the trilogy.

The message of the book seems to be that everyone must contribute in their own unique, but equally valuable ways to achieve the impossible and trust is about believing that they will figure out how to do so, even if you don’t see how. I feel like few fantasy books emphasize enough how the impossible really, truly often is exactly that, unless the people in a team with unique, complementary capabilities all perform their very best at the right place at the right time in the right way and so I think that this is a rather great message!

Major recommendation for all fans of fantasy, mystery and writing in general! There is a lot to learn from here.