The book “Steelheart” by Brandon Sanderson is a story about a post apocalyptic world where people with individually unique powers dominate the earth. Those who are gifted with powers, dubbed “epics”, have a cruel nature towards regular people, deeming them as insignificant. The only way to neutralize an epic’s powers is to discover their weakness. There are only a few communities of humans where a basic society has formed under the rule of epics who enjoy the power they have over lesser humans. One of these is Newcago, where the main protagonist David Charleston lives. David’s father was killed by the epic Steelheart during the initial chaos when epics first received their powers from the appearance of a strange star called Calamity. That day, David saw Steelheart’s power of invulnerability become compromised when he was wounded by David’s father. Now Steelheart is the tyrannic ruler of Newcago, and by working together with the Reckoners, a group of normal humans whose goal is to find the weaknesses of and kill powerful epics, David is the key to finding Steelheart’s weakness and bringing him down.

This book was a major thriller for me to read. The concept behind the power of each epic individually and the levels of how powerful epics were was a creative concept. Some epics were hardly powerful at all, having powers such as never running out of bullets, while others were powerful enough to be known as high epics, such as Steelheart’s invulnerability to most weapons along with the ability to shoot energy from his hands, turn inanimate things into steel, and fly. Each epic’s weakness was tailored precisely to them and it was a crazy, high stakes mystery to find out each one. I loved the suspense behind trying to guess what each epic’s weakness was and especially the theories behind why these weaknesses existed. The book shows you an entire world that even the main characters don’t completely understand, and it leaves a lot of room to the imagination along with keeping up the suspense and excitement as we discover more and more about this new universe along with the characters. I also really like the underdog tone that the tale took on. David is a perfectly normal and nondescript human who is a bit of a dork and knows everything about epics due to his obsession to get revenge for his father’s death. He is underestimated by epics and by the renowned Reckoners, but in every dangerous mission he proves them wrong over and over again. I was rooting for him throughout the whole story and became really invested in him as he kept rising up against everything that was against him despite his seeming lack of power and ability. It forced conflicts to be solved in creative and innovative ways since David couldn’t just use powers to force his way out of problems. Finally, this book was chock full of plot twists. We think that Steelheart’s weakness had finally been discovered, and then we’re shot down. A Reckoners plot goes unexpectedly awry, and then gets back on track. New things are discovered about the characters with every page turn, giving rise to more and more questions about where loyalties lie and what secrets are being hidden. This book was constantly moving forward at a breakneck pace, with each plot twist being so sudden and unexpected it gave me whiplash. I loved the excitement that this created for the plot and how nothing could be expected or prepared for in this book.

I honestly can’t think of a single thing I would change about this book. The plot was well developed and constantly changing while still remaining exciting and reasonable, the characters were interesting, likable, and well developed, and the entire concept behind the world that Sanderson has created is unique and engaging. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning poring over this book, and while I don’t recommend doing that ever, I definitely do recommend reading “Steelheart”.