The magic? Impeccable. The world building? Fantastic. The characters? Wildly hit or miss. The plot? Fairly basic and uninspiring.

I get why people love this book, I really do. Sanderson is excellent at world building and creating unique magic systems. However, Sanderson fails to 1️⃣ write a convincing complex woman, 2️⃣ not repeat himself, 3️⃣ trust his audience, and 4️⃣ avoid predictability.

Mild spoilers beyond this point.

This book starts off promising a hesit story line but then stumbles into uninteresting political intrigue, told through the lens of a supposedly hardened street urchin who forgets her 1.5 decades of oppression and abuse at the first sign of a pretty boy, and languishes there for a solid 200 pages. When the plot picks up again the heist is long gone and we're back to pretty standard fantasy plot lines. It's rough & didn't really deliver what I was hoping for.

Some specific gripes: Sanderson doesn't trust us to understand Vin as she struggles to adapt to her new role, and instead beats us over the head with the exact same internal struggle repeatedly. Vin's emotional range is limited, unsophisticated, and reduces what should be a badass woman into a victim of childish "feminine" urges. I absolutely did not understand, or believe, Vin's arc in this story. It's was forced & tacky & and I hope Sanderson never writes about women picking out dresses again.

Kelsier isn't much better. While I appreciate that's maybe an original morally gray character, I mostly found him insufferable and I hate that he gets vindicated in the end.

I would literally die for Sazed, though, and he's the biggest redeeming aspect of this book.

Most frustratingly, The Final Empire is guilty of my biggest literary pet peeve: inconsistent POV changes. Page 470 is not an appropriate time to break the POV mechanism & I wanted to throw the book every time it changed after that.

You might say that The Final Empire was maladroitly written.