'The Rithmatist' by Brandon Sanderson
'The Rithmatist' by Brandon Sanderson

3.5 stars.

The good

  • Interesting magic system based on the ability to imbue power into chalk drawings: e.g., you can draw circles as defensive barriers, lines to shoot at others, and little cartoon characters (e.g., knights, dragons, lizards) that become animated, move around, and provide defense or offense. The book includes examples of these drawings at the start of each chapter and sometimes in the middle of chapters to help illustrate what’s happening.

  • Interesting world building based on Rithmatists, who have the ability to imbue chalk drawings with power, and the world that is organized around training them and sending them off to protect humanity from wild chalk drawings that would otherwise overrun society.

  • As is typical of Brandon Sanderson stories, it revolves around a central mystery, most of which gets resolved with some clever plot twists by the end of the story.

  • Also as is typical of Brandon Sanderson stories, the writing is good, and the story moves along at a fast pace.

The not so good

  • This is more of a young adult novel, focused on teens, so it’s a little simpler and milder of a story than some of his others.

  • I didn’t find the characters in this book as good as some of the others. Melody is a fun and quirky character, but the protagonist, Joel, and all the antagonists (who I will leave unnamed to avoid spoilers) are pretty generic and bland.

  • The book spends so much time setting up the rules of Rithmatics and building up all the powers and abilities, but then you hit the end of the book, and realize the powers were barely used at all in the actual plot! We only see something like 3 battles (duels) the entire book, and most of those are short, so it feels like a ton of build up with little pay off. Moreover, one of Brandon Sanderson’s strengths is the ability to write clear, exciting, badass battle scenes that make exceptionally clever use of the magic system in the story (e.g., the Mistborn series does an incredible job of this), so it was really disappointing to see so little of that in this book.

  • Adding to the disappointment is that the ending in this book resolves a little bit of the mystery, but the vast majority of it is left as a cliff hanger to be resolved in a future book. This book came out in 2013, and while a sequel is listed as “planned,” it’s now 10 years later, and I’m not aware of any progress on it, so it’s not clear if this story will ever be concluded.

Rating: 4 stars