Review: The Rithmatist

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sanderson writes long books - this is almost 400 pages, which for YA is fairly long - but he doesn't do it by being verbose, by putting in a lot of filler description, by infodumping, by spending time with a lot of side characters who aren't key to the plot, or by having long stretches of nothing happening, like a lot of people who write long books. They don't feel long, because he keeps the plot moving while compactly conveying the worldbuilding and the always complex and inventive magic system, often with the help of in-world documents.

The Rithmatist is no exception. It's perhaps younger YA, simply told and with no closer approach to romance than a few reflections along the lines of "she's kind of cute but also annoying" in passing, but it has a strong mystery-adventure plot, and I never felt like the young people should not be involved, or that the adults should be faulted for letting them be involved. He builds up a clear sense of threat, often doesn't make the obvious choice for where the plot goes next (a Sanderson trademark), and generally brings the reader along for the ride. I believed in the main character's fascination with the magic he can't access as well as in his friend's frustration with having been given it when she didn't want it, and in the motivations of the other characters as well.

It is, of course, a fun and original magic system, based on drawing magical diagrams with chalk, and involving quite a bit of geometry. The setting is a version of Earth where North America is an archipelago rather than a continent, with some of the islands being roughly the shape of our world's states, and sometimes also having similar or even identical names. In this world, the JoSeon (i.e. Korean) Empire has recently conquered Europe, and North America, because of monsters of mysterious origin, was largely uninhabited before European settlement. This is a choice Sanderson might not make today; the book was written in 2013, when the idea of an empty North America as a convenient way of not having to address Native Americans may have seemed more acceptable than it does today. He even repurposes a real-world colonial woman's narrative of being captured by Native Americans as a narrative of having been captured by wild chalklings (the monsters I mentioned). Some people will definitely have a problem with this approach, and I understand why.

More than 10 years later, this book is still waiting for its implied sequel (other projects having intervened); if that sequel ever comes, I will read it, because it was solidly written in the Sanderson style. Not one of his best books, but entertaining, definitely.

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