Review: The Bands of Mourning

The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel about this book essentially exactly what I felt about the last one, only moreso. The humour, while well-executed, is getting a little over-the-top, and hits kind of a wrong note against the rest of the plot. I also feel that power escalation is becoming a problem. It's a common one, in fantasy, but ironically it's worse here because Sanderson did such a _good_ job in the first book of making his magic feel realistic and not overpowering. By this book, Wax is shrugging off bullets from literally hundreds of trained soldiers at once, and it feels like reading an issue of SuperMan comics more than the Western-with-magic that it started as.

I did appreciate that Sanderson never even pretended that Wax's sister (view spoiler)[ hadn't gone over to the badguys (hide spoiler)]. It was so obvious from the moment we met her that it would have been nearly insulting to have him jump out and yell "Gotcha!"

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