Firefight by Brandon Sanderson: David you utter dork

Firefight 

by 

Brandon Sanderson

This is the second books guys so there will be spoilers.

The Reckoners are moving on. With Steelheart dead and Newcago relatively safe from any new threats it seems time to move on to the next city. This next city is what’s left of New York and it’s fabulous. Almost completely submerged by Regalia, the water epic who is tyrant over Whatever The Heck She Called the City. I can’t spell it. So of course it’s the Reckoner’s (a.k.a. David’s) job to come up with a plan to knock her down a few pegs. Side plots include, David trying to find his not-dead girlfriend, Helping Prof the closet epic not snap and destroy everything, having the occasional conversation with an epic who speaks in fortune cookies 

and dealing with an epic who is basically a living bomb. Good times.

Characters

David: I love David so much! He’s an amazingly capable protagonist but he’s such a dork at the same time! That is an impressive combination to pull off! He’s clever and kind but he’s also totally obsessed with the epics (also Megan but we’ll get to that later). And his metaphors! 

“you’re like a potato!” 

how romantic David you utter dork, I like you.

Megan: in the first book, I had mixed feelings about Megan. She seemed like an overly clichés too cool for you love interest, that is until she died and turned out to be an epic. That twist kind of saved her from being generally dull and a bit unlikeable. This time around though! Heck yes! It’s funny, I’ve seen plenty of main characters who have this awesome power that they repress in fear of it getting out of control but I haven’t seen a lot of love interest in that place. I like it.

And she had a good reason to fear her power! Using it too much caused her to fall deeper and deeper into epic thinking. Arrogant and remorseless without a regard for human life. She was awesome to say the least.

Prof: Still an Epic, still an occasional jerk, still a slightly scary evil mastermind.

Tia: Still awesome! And still obsessed with cola.

Mizzy: newest character who is so incredibly adorable! And it’s nice to have a female character that isn’t a love interest (yes I know Tia is here but she doesn’t count because she’s old enough to be David’s mother). She was cheery and kind even though she was a bit of newcomer to the Reckoners. I loved her she was awesome.

Two other peoples that I barely paid any attention too: 

Sorry Sanderson but it looks like old habits die hard. These two characters were insignificant enough that I don’t even remember their names. Oops.

Likes

The escalation! The first book was all like ‘we’re crazy but we’re going to take down this high epic who is practically invincible and we’ll probably all die’ and then this book rolls around and they kill an epic a chapter. Okay that’s a complete exaggeration but I actually kind of adored it.

 A good chunk of the book was about unraveling the mystery around epics and their weaknesses and the increase in epic killing made them seem much more human I guess. Much less like invincible un-killable demigods.

Megan characterization huzzah! I’ve already gushed about how happy I am that Megan got a bit more development but dang it I’m going to praise it again. It was fabulous and I love her. She is officially one of my favorite love interests.

It was impressively funny: At its heart I think the Reckoner series is a dystopian. As you know I’ve got a love hate relationship with dystopias.  Mainly because they seem to have an urge to keep the characters and the reader miserable or half dead all the time! 

Obviously, that’s not the case here.

There wasn’t really one big plot twist this time around. Yes, that’s a good thing. This time around I just didn’t actually know what I thought I knew. Is that even intelligible?  Everything I thought I knew, about the epics, the plot, Regalia’s plans, etc. turned out to be completely wrong. There you go.

Dislikes

Prof was just kind of a jerk: I know it’s technically because he’s an epic and he gets crabby when he uses his powers etc. etc. but goodness he’s also a bit of a backstabbing twerp with serious trust issues. 

Or maybe that’s just in comparison to David’s relative trustfulness.

              But the best thing about this is there wasn’t any sequel blues! Almost all my favorite characters came back, at least one interesting character was introduced and even the character I was on the fence about turned out to be awesome! Also, where is calamity? Because of course there’s a cliffhanger. There’s always a cliffhanger it’s Sanderson.