The first half of The Paladin Caper combines the best parts of The Palace Job - the humor and character interactions - with the best parts of The Prophecy Con - the true high fantasy plot - as the ancients are beginning to return to the world. It introduces the perfect villain for the setting, incompetent yes-man Handel Westteich. And it even finds a way to make Kail’s “your mother” jokes funny. After completion of the first arc, the novel flounders for a bit, but the payout of the climax is excellent and well worth the wait.

You know that video with the couple on a picnic blanket that zooms out until you’re looking at the entire galaxy? In Jade City we were on the picnic blanket. In Jade War we zoomed out and saw three entire years of life. Now with Jade Legacy, Fonda Lee spans decades to conclude the saga of an entire generation of Kauls, ushering in the next. It’s a work of art. It’s everything you could ever ask for. It will leave you emotionally bare at every twist and turn as No Peak and the Mountain continue to fight each other at home and abroad, and new enemies await both clans at every moment of their journeys.

Jade War continues where Jade City left off, with No Peak struggling to keep up with their rival Mountain clan in Janloon on the island nation of Kekon, and the while focus remains on this struggle, the struggle itself adapts to a more international scale as a proxy war breaks out and clans pick sides. Even more so than in Jade City, there’s no single focus to the plot; instead, we follow the lives of the major characters across the globe and over a time frame of several years, watching them adapt to new circumstances and new challenges. And like Jade City, it’s utterly captivating.

Where The Palace Job was incapable of taking itself seriously for more than a couple paragraphs at a time, The Prophecy Con returns with a high-stakes storyline from the start with the fates of nations - and perhaps the world - relying on the back of this volume’s heist. Or, more accurately, heists. Remember “The Love Song Eillenfiniel” that we just spent an entire book stealing and then gave to the elves? Yep, it’s time to steal it all over again. Why? Er…the crew isn’t quite sure, and they need to figure it out quickly.

I knew going into this to expect slow, but after I’d heard the same about Words of Radience yet preferred it to Way of Kings, I wasn’t sure if I actually believed it. Unfortunately, this was…slow. The first bit was great, and the last bit was just as incredible as the endings to the first three novels (I cried at least twice), but good god Venli is the most tedious character ever and maybe one of the flashback chapters total had anything remotely interesting in it.

Unlike Edgedancer, I don’t think Dawnshard can be read on its own; it’s too tightly embedded into the overall story arc of the Stormlight Archive. But I wanted to write a review of it anyway, because it deals with physical disability so incredibly well, something pretty rare in fantasy. Major spoilers for all Stormlight content up to and through Oathbringer (but not Dawnshard itself) follow.

Finally, a return to the scale of a Cosmere novel! Not that I would have minded more of the intimate setting of the first two, but…this is really what I’m here for. Being so late in the series, I don’t have much to say without spoilers, but overall a very solid novel. I think my favorite of all of the Mistborn so far, really.

A whole which is not greater than the sum of its parts, Shadows of Self is at once a return to the urban fantasy setting of The Alloy of Law and also an expansion to the greater mythos of Scadrial. Each of these halves on its own works and is engaging, thrilling, enjoyable, all of the things you want out of a Mistborn novel, but put them together the way they are here, and you get an unsatisfying explanation for events that falls flat.

The Alloy of Law is much more urban fantasy than the high fantasy of the rest of the Cosmere, in a Scadrial that is suddenly…the Industrial Revolution? Electricity? Railroads? Fifty-story buildings? What? Yeah, okay. I wasn’t convinced by this for the first 20% or so, but of course this is Cosmere, so I fell in love with the characters and the plot was amazing and I loved it and it’s a great book. Of course.

What a ride! I knew to expect intense, and Oathbringer completely lived up to expectations! I don’t have many non-spoilery things to say, but I laughed and I cried, and I reread some parts to laugh again two or three times as I was reading them, and oh man the ending was intense.