This year I've been on a bit of a Brandon Sanderson kick. My partner got a job with a pretty significant commute, so we got ourselves an Audible membership, and found the time to listen to all of the Brandon Sanderson books that my Dungeons and Dragons group obsess over—The Stormlight Archives, Warbreaker, and, of course, the Mistborn trilogy. That might have been the nerdiest sentence I've written, but hey, I'm also extremely basic.
The Hero of Ages is the third and final book in the Mistborn trilogy. Yeah, I know that there's a sequel trilogy, but as far as I know, the sequel trilogy takes place centuries after Mistborn, so the characters you've grown to know and love over this trilogy are no longer present. In the Hero of Ages, we follow the characters from the earlier books—Vin, Elend, Spook, Breeze, Sazed, Tensoon—as they find themselves caught in a battle between two competing gods—Preservation and Ruin.
While the Mistborn saga is regularly praised for world-building and magic systems—which, credit where credit is due, Sanderson absolutely kills it in both of these aspects—what really stood out to me on this read of The Hero of Ages was Sanderson's willingness to grapple with faith, atheism, and hope. Sanderson and I share a foundational faith—Mormonism. As far as I know, Sanderson is still actively involved in the faith, and I have left. But throughout The Hero of Ages, I identified deeply with one of the foremost characters who transforms from religious teacher to atheistic skeptic searching for something to place his faith in. So often in Mormon writing, nonbelievers are painted as villainous, lazy, or misled. Sanderson avoids these tropes, instead allowing his character caught in the middle of a faith crisis dimensions to be wounded, lost, and ultimately hopeful.
The rest of the novel is filled with smart twists, and surprising payoffs that Sanderson established in the first few chapters of Mistborn, nearly two-thousand pages before in the story. The main characters have satisfying conclusions to their character arcs, and the stakes are high, so it's a hard book to put down—or press pause on, if you're listening on Audible.