Elantris by Brandon Sanderson : Book Review

Over the last few years, Brandon Sanderson has quickly risen to be one of my favorite authors. My discovery of him was an odd journey. I had stopped reading Wheel of Time in a gap between book releases, so hadn’t found him there. Instead, I had decided one day that I wanted to find some books with superheroes in them, in part because I was thinking of writing one. I picked up Steelheart and began to read. I didn’t like it. Mostly the idea that everyone who had superpowers was evil frustrated me. But I kept reading, and I discovered that there was more to the story than simply a group of humans hunting down superheroes. It’s still not my favorite book by Brandon Sanderson, but in the end I liked it well enough.

After that I tried one of his fantasies, so I picked up a book more or less at random and found Warbreaker. I enjoyed it more, but not enough to seek out any of his other books, and I largely forgot about him for a while until I finished the Wheel of Time. Something I didn’t do until the entire series was released. By the time I got to the last book, the name Brandon Sanderson seemed familiar, but I connect it to all the other books until after I finished the series and looked him up.

His ability to finish a series I loved and do it well was enough to get me interested. That was when I found The Stormlight Archive books. I still almost stopped partway through the first book. I was listening to it in audiobook format and the main character was in the army and seemed to be doing reasonably well there. I got distracted, and he was a slave. So I went back and discovered I really had missed little. So I continued, and the gaps were filled in, and as anyone who has read the Stormlight Archive books by the end, enough had happened that I was hooked. I have since read the book twice more. That makes it one of a tiny number of books I’ve reread more than once, along with “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

Now I’m working my way through the rest of the Cosmere, trying to go slow and so only reading one of them every few books. I have read everything in the Mistborn series that is currently out and enjoyed both eras. And this time I picked up Elantris. By now I know to trust Brandon when the beginning of a book feels slow. And I pick up on some hints and clues about the Cosmere, like my attention being drawn to the name Hoid and perhaps someday I’ll even be ready to go into the secret histories or the novellas. But for now I’m talking about “Elantris”.

What Happens in Elantris?

Elantris is far more about character than most fantasy books. That is true of many of Brandon Sanderson’s stories. The story follows two main characters. The first is Raoden, the popular son of the unpopular king of Arelon. He is engaged to Sarene the daughter of the king of a neighboring kingdom that needs an alliance with Arelon because a neighboring empire is growing dangerous.

That danger is because of the fall of Elantris. A city that had once been the home to people who were considered gods by much of the rest of the world. They were long lived, and able to use Aons to do magic. But ten years ago, something happened. The Elantrians lost their magic and became physically weak and sickly. But as before the change, people still become Elantrians more or less at random. When that happens, they are thrown into the city of Elantris and are treated as if they are dead.

Early in the story Raoden is cursed to become an Elantrian and even though he is the son of the king he is said to be dead and throw into the city. There he discovers the true curse of the Elantrians. They don’t die, but they also don’t heal. Because of this, when he stubs his toe a few minutes after arriving in the city, his foot remains in pain basically forever. But an even bigger problem is that there is no food in the city except for the small offerings thrown in with the dead. And while they don’t need to eat in order to survive, they become hungrier the longer they go without food, so the city has broken down into gangs who attack everyone who comes into the city to steal their food.

Raoden now in the city sees the problems and begins to work on helping the people of the city by rescuing the people who are thrown in the city rather than allowing them to be robbed and beaten by the gangs. As he does, he begins to learn to understand the city better. Slowly learning to understand that the people in the city are victims and while some choose to victimize others to survive, they do it largely out of self preservation. He also discovers that some gang leaders are better people than he first assumed.

Outside of the city Sarene arrives to discover that her fiance died before she arrived, but because of the marital contract she was in fact married to him and remains in the city and spends much of the book in various schemes to help Arelon even though she has just arrived. But there are a great many threats. Its king is a terrible ruler, and thanks to the collapse of the Elantrian’s government, enemy nations are seeking to capture the country by converting its citizens.

Much of the middle of the book is about these two characters first working separately then beginning to get to know each other as Serene begins to help the people of Elantris and meets Raoden who is unrecognizable and hiding who he is for fear that anyone knowing who he is would make things worse.

This romance is a fairly good fantasy version of a romance. Raoden knows who Serene is and wants her to like him even though he can’t be with her and Serene thinks of him as a gang leader and tyrant who is starving the people of the city who aren’t in his gang but grows to like him despite what she thinks.

The end of the book comes with two things that seemed inevitable throughout the story. First, the attack of the enemy nation and secondly Raoden’s discovery of what happened to the Elantrians turning the end into a race to return the half dead people of Elantris to their own power before they can be burned to death by the enemy soldiers.

I’ll leave the exact nature of the solution to the book, but as one might expect, the solution comes at the last possible second and allows for a climatic battle and eventually the culmination of the romance plot of the book in a marriage.

What did I think of Elantris

This isn’t Brandon Sanderson’s best story. The middle is slow, and it’s marginally more predictable than most of his other novels. Beyond that, the characters while likable and enjoyable don’t have the same depth as many of the characters in his other works. Part of this is because while they go through difficult times, they don’t have the level of brokenness that many other Sanderson characters do. So, if you’re looking for Vin or Kaladin in this story, you will not find it, though I’d say that you get a fairly good approximation of Elend Venture.

In the end, this isn’t a book I’d recommend as someone’s entry point into Brandon Sanderson’s work. But then I wouldn’t recommend reading the books in the order I did either, and it works out well enough. But there is some advantage in this being one of the few of his books I have read that is not part of a major series of books. So in the end I’d say this is in the lower end of Brandon Sanderson novels for me, but it’s still good and if he ever writes more in the series, I’d read it.