Review - Steelheart (and err...Vicious?)

Title: Steelheart
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Genre: YA, science fiction, dystopia

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Goodreads Summary:
Ten years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics. But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his wills.
Nobody fights the Epics...nobody but the Reckoners. A shadowy group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.
And David wants in. He wants Steelheart - the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David's father. For years, like the Reckoners, David's been studying, and planning - and he has something they need. Not an object, but an experience.
He's seen Steelheart bleed. And he wants revenge.

Brandon Sanderson continues to be a storytelling god.

This is the fourth book I've read by him (the first three being the Mistborn trilogy), and I had really high expectations going in. Never mind that this one is marketed as YA while the rest of his books are marketed as epic fantasy - I expected nothing less than the usual Sanderson Brilliance.

And I got it.

This book is what I wanted out of V.E. Schwab's Vicious. Both books feature a futuristic world populated by a few superhuman people/creatures that are morally complex and very troublesome. By troublesome, I mean they run around killing people. The main plot of the novels are very different, although they are both driven by revenge. Somehow I was able to connect with Sanderson's characters and their struggles more than Schwab's, which is probably why I enjoyed this one more (also it probably helps that Sanderson is a storytelling god. Just saying).

I'm sorry this review is turning into more of a compare and contrast exercise between the two books, but I couldn't read Steelheart without thinking of Vicious. I really liked the explanation for the superpowers in Vicious, and since we haven't really gotten one yet in the world of Steelheart, I'm hoping it's just as good.

A minor complaint about this book, which is why it got four stars and not a full five - I felt like the writing style took some getting used to. I know that this book is marketed as YA and is thus written for a younger audience, but I have read plenty of YA books that are incredibly well-written and don't seem dumbed down at all. At first I felt like this book was a watered-down version of the usual Sanderson prose, but eventually things got going and I was able to get past the writing style.

I would definitely recommend this to Sanderson fans, as well as people who loved Vicious. It's a superhero story where the heros aren't the ones with the supernatural powers - if that sounds like a fantastic premise, why yes it is.

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