I was given the first, then made sure to get the other two (due to them not being in our library). And... I'm still not sure how much I like them. :-/
This review/analysis will necessarily contain spoilers, but I'll try to keep them mild. You should be able to read these and still enjoy the books just as much - the main one is just that a character you don't think is going to die, doesn't die. ;)
My first issue was with the blurb on the back of The Final Empire - and the front, for that matter - which states the really interesting premise: What if the Dark Lord won? Great, fascinating - but we are very, very quickly told that the 'Dark Lord' is the Chosen One who turned evil. Which means that either the blurb is a flat-out lie, or it's a massive spoiler for the fact that the premise contains a flat-out lie. That left me skeptical. (In fact, at no point in The Final Empire is any character mentioned who could even be a Dark Lord from the Chosen One's story. So the blurb is a lie whatever else happens.)
Secondly, Elend. I don't have any particular problem with Elend himself - but why does he end up in a position of such prominence in The Well of Ascension? That never sat right with me. He was not a person the heroes of the first book should ever have looked to in the way they did, and nothing made sense of it for me at any point.
Thirdly, the chapter-heading documents. I liked them. I liked the way they sneak you the backstory, and I like the way they do it through an inherently biased viewpoint.
But. When the first two books pivot on the fact that there is something misleading about those excerpts (and, thankfully, they are different misleading things)... how much of an idiot would I have to be to believe the implication of the third one?
Fourthly, while I adore his worldbuilding, I'm not so sure about the way he works things in. I can't recall the details, but I'm sure there were at least a few things which were just sort of dropped on us, in a 'if this were actually true the characters should absolutely have done something about it earlier'.
Relatedly, I'm sure there were some tricks people played with metals which they ought to have been using all the time, but which they only pulled once. I can't remember specifics, though, and a lot of 'one-off' tricks did end up being used over and over.
But... I liked the setting, and many of the characters, and a lot of the reveals came as a surprise (which is good). The cast felt believably flawed, and I appreciated the fact that, in the latter two books, you didn't feel that the characters were safe (even from being killed).
So I honestly don't know. It's all very irritating. ^_^
hS
