I loved this book for so many different reasons, not least that Sanderson gives females active roles. In his acknowledgements he states that he watched ‘The Princess Bride’ from the book of the same name by William Goldman during the Covid lockdowns with his family and his wife asked ‘What if the Princess had gone off to rescue Wesley?’ which was one of the inspirations behind this book. It’s telling that even in the title of Goldman’s book the Princess isn’t named, whereas Sanderson has the female lead’s name as the first word in the title. In fact, most of the major characters in this book are female.
Telling the story from the telling it from the POV of a fairly minor character within the book who has some ‘issues’ (I won’t say more than that as I don’t want to give any spoilers!), rather from the main character gives it an interesting twist as it means that character can give all kinds of unusual insights into the actions of the other characters and how the story is progressing. I also like that each chapter had a unique person assigned to it (e.g. ‘The Other Corpse’. ‘The Captain’).
This will probably shock people, but I’ve only read two or three other Brandon Sanderson books, mainly because I feel that there are just too many them to get my head around, but I really enjoyed this one. As it’s a standalone with only a few references to Sanderson’s other Cosmere Books I didn’t feel that I was missing out too much by not having delved into his other books first.
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