Yuffie's Book Reviews

Steelheart - by Brandon Sanderson

--Published Book--

The premise of this story is that there was an event called Calamity that gave thousands of people superpowers and a weakness, and they were named Epics. When David, the protagonist, was 8 years old, he was in a Chicago bank with his dad. An Epic named Steelheart, came and took over the entire city. Shit goes down, and David's dad accidentally shoots Steelheart--and nicks him in the cheek. It was the only and only time anyone had ever seen Steelheart bleed. Steelheart kills David's dad and everyone else who witnessed it. But David managed to escape unnoticed. 

So the story continues 10 years later when David's 18. He's spent his life obsessed with the Epics. He's basically a walking Epic encyclopedia. There's a resistance group called the Reckoners who hunt down Epics, and David joins them on his mad path of revenge against Steelheart and his oppressive regime.

The Writing
This felt like a second draft--plot holes and continuity errors were fixed, but Sanderson didn't put much effort in making the prose sparkle. It was clunky at times, wordy other times, with a lot of telling and infodumps, and kind of harsh and unpolished. There was filtering galore, which I couldn't ignore since it was in every other paragraph. It wasn't the worst writing I've ever seen, but it definitely could've been more polished.

The Characters
Mary Sues, the lot of them.

David was a little dorky, but he had no other flaws. He knew everything a normal guy could know about Epics. He knew more than the freaking Epic hunters (the Reckoners). And he'd worked in a gun factory once he became orphaned, so he not only knew the make and model of every gun, he could use brand new, never-before-seen guns without any instruction or practice. He was a perfect shot with a rifle. And he seemed pretty fit if he could run around so much without breaking a sweat. Yes, he got hurt sometimes, but not from his own follies.

Even his improvised plans always worked. They were just too perfect, especially for being thought up on the spot. Everything always went his way, far too conveniently.

And the female lead, Megan, was Natasha Romanov. Distant and mysterious but still with a sort of soft side, very serious about her work. Drop dead gorgeous (David never failed to remind us how attractive and hot he thought she was). She was even better with a gun than David. Like, superhuman good, firing two guns at the same time, at a target in midair, and landing kill shots. She was a phenomenal driver of cars and high-speed motorcycles, and she even kept mini-explosives in her shirt. Gah.

Extreme Mary Sue warning right there. She had no flaws. There's a bit of a plot twist at the end as to her background and who she is, but that was a far cry from her having any substance as a character.

The other Reckoners were just one-dimensional fillers. They had personality, but not very deep stuff going on with characterization. They were just meh. They weren't characters I'd miss if they died.

The dialogue between them felt very forced and awkward. It was like they were trying to joke around, but they still felt uncomfortable. It wasn't natural or deep.

Plot
Pretty standard for a superhero novel. There were some creative little inserts with the worldbuilding. For example, Steelheart turned everything to steel when he took over, and there were some underground catacombs the "Diggers" created but stopped halfway because they went crazy for some unexplained reason.... And the Reckoners had these things called "tensors", gloves that allowed them to push out these vibration things and vaporize solid, non-living matter. Those were pretty cool and added a unique layer to how they went about their schemes.

Besides that, there wasn't much that blew my mind in terms of plot. Kid watches his dad get murdered, kid grows up obsessed with vengeance, joins the rag-tag group of rebels, fights evil villain.

I mentioned some plot twists at the very end, but 1. there were too many of them that kind of made me roll my eyes because it was a little over-the-top and a little too convenient. And since they were thrown in right at the last chapter, it felt like a quick copout to explain some of the small inconsistensies in the story.

So overall, I was pretty meh about this book. There were some really cool action sequences, but the book lacked the "human" substance to make it hit you in the feels. I never truly connected with the characters. They were just people pushing the plot forward, not people I genuinely cared about or sympathized for.

I heard that Sanderson churns out books with the speed of light--and The Rithmatist and Steelheart were both published in 2013. So I think the quality of his writing does suffer because he's just trying to get out as many stories as possible, without giving too much heart and soul to it.

It was an okay read, especially for anyone who loves action, superheroes, conversations about guns and bazookas and vaporizing gloves and gigantic guns and assault rifles and motorcycles with gravatonics and all that good stuff. This was quite honestly a book jam packed with testerosterone. I personally love testosterone-fuled stories, but this was a bit extreme and still lacked the dimensional qualities of a satisfying story, with near-perfect, Mary Sue characters, a predictable plot, and very little emotion (David became a cardboard box when he found out the big plot twist at the end, which should've been extremely harrowing and mind-blowing to him, but he calmly explains it to another member of his team without missing a beat).


3.5/5 stars