This book kept reminding me of Hollow Knight: Silksong while I was reading it, and I eventually figured out why: the settings are basically the same if you ignore the fact that one of them is made of bugs.
I mean, think about it. A dying kingdom ruled by an evil god who the female protagonist doesn't like? Without asking a clarifying question like "is everyone bugs," there's really no way to know whether that's describing the Final Empire from Mistborn or Pharloom from Hollow Knight: Silksong.
(There's a review of Silksong coming soon, but I hadn't finished it yet when I wrote this review--the game is really long, as befits something that took seven years to make.)
As it turns out, "grabbing random books off the middle-grade fiction shelves" does not find you books that are nearly as good as those found by the far superior method of "getting your friends to recommend them to you". This was recommended by the same person who introduced me to Cleopatra in Space.
This book is very well-written. It has a unique setting, not just Generic Fantasy Medieval Europe Setting #3587, and it feels very atmospheric within the setting.
Mistborn is apparently the start of a ridiculously long series/universe/thing, the Cosmere. If I do end up reading the entire series, it'll be over the course of years; I'm not going to binge it, both because I suspect that it would make the overall experience worse and because it sounds like too much work.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T15+ for fantasy violence and some sexual references (people talk about prostitution and children born out of wedlock, and there are a couple mentions of rape in there).
4 stars.
(Endnote: This universe, instead of sandwiches, has "baywraps", which are basically fantasy burritos. I am inordinately fond of them.)
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