Warbreaker

I wasn't particularly fond of the novel I read for the "Emerging Directions in Traditional Fantasy" week. The novel I chose was Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson. While it was great that the author was offering the novel for free, the story was written in a way that felt targeted towards quite a younger audience than college students, even though some of the content in the book was fairly adult. Admittedly, the story kept me reading page after page, but it took no effort in subtlety with its storytelling devices. It's difficult for me to specifically target things I didn't like about the book, since the list is so expansive. For starters, the characters lack depth (this was probably at its worst with the mercenaries), the color and breath symbolism is painfully obvious, the dialogue is hamfisted at best (example: "Would he take away her Breath?" from Chapter 6), the author demonstrates a lack of understanding of color theory throughout the book, the basic plot points and internal conflicts are drilled into the reader's head way too often throughout the course of the entire book, the general writing style is too simple for my tastes, the comic relief caused more forehead-slapping than laughter, and the book only seems to cover the internal conflicts of the characters at the surface level. It's weird though, because even with all of the above, I kept reading page after page. Being simple did help the novel immensely with reader comprehension, since it was very easy for me to keep a mental model of the story and they were able to keep more than four intertwining storylines going at once without any confusion occurring. I guess I was just expecting more from the book, considering the very high reception it's received from most other people.