A quick assessment of the most recent fantasy novels I've read (by coincidence, all four are I had to be put on the waiting list to get ahold of, due to the high number of other readers interested in these books for one reason or another):
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
A book about a girl with the Grace (essentially specialized power) to kill other people. Meaning she's a really, really good fighter and she always wins. Except it loses a lot of the credibility in the attempting-to-empower-women department due to the fact that there are no other women fighters in the novel - or even in the military, apparently - and she's surrounded by dozens and dozens of male characters. I only got halfway through, but I didn't even encounter a single other female character.
The main character also proved herself to be unbearably self-centered when it was revealed that the other Graceling she had met had different powers from what she thought he had (he could read people's minds...sort of) and threw a temper tantrum, refusing to speak to him, and complaining about how difficult it was for her. Then the two of them escaped to the countryside, and she turned uber moody and hated him and cried over him and was madly in love with him all in the course of a split second...and they spent long moments thinking about one another as it devolved into a romance...and I stopped reading.
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson.
For the most part, I loved the Mistborn trilogy. And even here, Sanderson is one of the most readable writers I've ever encountered. But, similar to Cashore, he tends to lose some credibility in making the main characters female; though his is due more to the fact that, in the ultimate climax, neither of them did anything active or of importance whatsoever. His three major male characters, however, all did. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, they were all significantly important, and the sisters Siri and Vivenna...not so much. I also found that their characterizations were little more than different facets of Vin. Though, at least in this book, he actually had other female characters with names and everything besides the two protagonists.
Also, while the gradually-revealing-mystery method worked spectacularly well in the Mistborn books - primarily because the world was so interesting and original - here, it started to feel a little trite. Maybe Sanderson could experiment with different methods of storytelling; I'd hate to think that he's already run out of ideas with how to tell his stories.
And can someone tell me why this book was called Warbreaker? What is a Warbreaker, exactly?
Would I read a sequel? Probably not.
Fablehaven by Brandon Mull
This one has being getting a lot of attention, and everyone seems to be reading it, so I thought I'd see what the fuss was all about. My first reaction: nothing special. I mean, it has some relatively interesting ideas, that for reasons I'm not quite sure why, don't seem all that original. It also doesn't help that the two main characters seemed rather stereotyped for people of their age; she, as the girl, is cautious and obedient and never does anything wrong. And he, as the boy, is always disobedient and adventurous and up for doing anything exciting. Plus, there seemed to be a repetition of: Seth is told not to do something; he does it anyway; consequences ensue; the situation is rectified and the aforementioned person takes responsibility; repeat. It made Seth a really unlikeable character.
Plus, it took more than half the book just to develop a plot. I was starting to get a little bored with the day-to-day activity, and was just waiting for something to finally happen. And the book's ultimate theme/moral seems a bit convoluted; don't ever take any risks, and as a result, you'll be able to save your family...by taking risks...???? I don't quite understand how the reward for Kendra of never having done anything to participate in the fantasy of the forest and allowing her to be the one person to save everyone quite worked out. So are we to take away from this that we should take risks? That we shouldn't? I suspect Mull didn't know when he wrote it.
That being said, I will definitely read all of the sequels. In the same vein, I would never judge the Harry Potter series by the first book - or even the second - and I've been assured by others that the series gets better.
Storm Glass by Maria Snyder.
I loved Poison Study. Magic Study was a fun read, but lost me at the end. Fire Study was difficult to follow. But picking up with another character intrigued me enough (though, in general, I'm not a fan of first-person, and I rather wish she hadn't continued with that style of writing). It was engaging enough of a read - though I did find my attention drifting at times, (which is what happened to me in Fire Study). The character was fine, but she rather suffered due to what I feel is Snyder's greatest weakness exemplified in this book: she's a bit of a superficial storyteller. Though clocking in at over 500 hundred pages, with plenty of material, and sufficient amount of things happening, I feel like she kinds of glosses over in the rush to get to the next part of the story. It's like she's just skimming over the surface of everything - particularly any emotional or character moments - and never, ever lets herself really dip below the surface. And as a result, nothing ever really feels earned. It starts to leak her into the territory of writers who spend a lot of time telling and not showing. For example, Opal comes to the realization that she had been keeping herself aloof and distant from the other students, and this was repeated a great deal in the second half of the book - but I don't ever remember a time when she actually demonstrated that fact. Such a revelation would have worked better, even, if it had happened in the process of one her supposedly aloof interactions with another of the students.
The best way I can describe is that the storytelling just felt very, very rushed, and there were way too many moments that she skipped over dwelling on some of the most important material that required deeper contemplation. Even in some of the most essential, plot-driven parts of the story.
I wish I could say that I hope Snyder will get better as a writer, but she seems to have already hit her peak with her first book (Poison Study) and each book has gotten progressively worse. That being said, I would probably read a sequel, were it produced (which, I'm assuming there will be one).