This book is good. Unlike most epic-fantasy writers, Sanderson usually picks 1-3 people to be the "main" characters. He's good at letting you really know who the main characters are, what they think, and what their motivations probably are. A lot of epic fantasy just focuses on the what. Which is interesting, but missing a lot of the puzzle.
The first three pages of the intro describe some warriors who come back to fight evil every few thousand years, and then go into some sort of hibernation mode where they are mentally attacked by evil until the next round. If they die, they automatically go into slumber and come back for the next fight. If they live, they have to choose. This time, 9 of 10 of them live, and none are willing to go back to the torment.
Then we get started with the main story, which follows a few cool people (there are probably two main characters, one of which I liked better than the other, and he's probably more "main" than the other.) through their struggles. They have a really interesting caste system based on eye color, which Sanderson does effectively. He has a bunch of other interesting stuff that is interesting but doesn't get in the way of the storytelling.
It's cool, and it's 1,000 pages long. So basically, you get to pay the price of one book and get enough pages for three, which it essentially is. The only real drawback is that he does a bit of rewinding to fill us in on the timeline, while I found myself just wanting to know what happens NOW. But I suppose that was the point, and the back info was pretty interesting, too. I recommend this book!
There's a bit of combat, obviously, and people die but it's not terribly graphic. Brandon does a good job of making you kind of care about even the minor characters before he kills them off.
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