Editors Reads Verdict
The Bands of Mourning is the Era 2 series firing on all cylinders, balancing its genre-blending adventure with genuine Cosmere lore drops and a villain reveal that recontextualizes the entire arc. The expansion of the world beyond Elendel into genuinely alien territory marks a turning point — the Wax and Wayne books are no longer a lighter side story but a direct bridge to the series' larger ambitions.
What We Loved
- The world-expansion beyond Elendel opens the series to genuinely new fantasy territory
- The villain and their connection to the broader Cosmere is a genuine revelation
- The action sequences make the most creative use of twinborn abilities in the series
- MeLaan's character is the strongest new addition to the ensemble
Minor Drawbacks
- The first act's mystery setup is less focused than Shadows of Self's comparable section
- Some Cosmere lore drops will confuse readers not tracking the broader universe
- The romantic subplots are handled with less dexterity than the action
Key Takeaways
- → Series fiction gains momentum when it expands the scope of its world alongside its character stakes
- → Artifacts of immense power create interesting narrative constraints when their origin is mysterious
- → The strongest adventure stories use physical journeys to reveal character truths
- → Hidden civilizations work best when they reflect the values of the protagonists in distorted form
- → The most satisfying villain reveals are ones that were fair — the clues were there, but the reveal still surprises
| Author | Brandon Sanderson |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Tor Books |
| Pages | 448 |
| Published | January 26, 2016 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers of Shadows of Self continuing the series; Cosmere readers who want to see the broader universe develop; fans of adventure fantasy with strong ensemble dynamics. |
Out of the City
The first two Wax and Wayne books take place almost entirely in Elendel — a city that works as a setting precisely because its Victorian-era urban density makes allomantic combat and investigation simultaneously spectacular and believable. The Bands of Mourning makes the significant decision to send Wax, Wayne, Marasi, and Steris out of the city into uncharted lands, and this geographic expansion mirrors a thematic one.
The Bands themselves — metalminds supposedly created by the Lord Ruler that would grant any user all allomantic and feruchemical powers simultaneously — are a classic MacGuffin that becomes something more interesting when the pursuit reveals what kind of world exists beyond the Basin the main cast has always known.
MeLaan and the Ensemble
The addition of MeLaan, a kandra assigned to accompany the group, is the series’ best new character introduction. Her perspective on identity, longevity, and the relationship between the human characters who will die and the immortal beings who will watch them do so adds emotional texture that the previous books gestured at but didn’t fully develop. Her dynamic with Wayne — two beings who can transform but relate to that ability in entirely opposite ways — is consistently the most interesting relationship in the book.
Steris, who started as a comic foil, has grown across the series into something more complex: a woman whose rigid planning and apparent emotional unavailability is reframed here as a particular form of care rather than its absence.
The Revelation
The villain reveal and its connection to the broader Cosmere is where The Bands of Mourning announces itself as more than a side story. Sanderson has spent three books establishing the Wax and Wayne series as a lighter, genre-mixing adventure in the Mistborn world. Here he reveals that the stakes have been cosmere-level all along. Readers who have been following the broader universe across Sanderson’s novels will experience genuine surprise; those who haven’t will experience the narrative equivalent of the ground shifting under them.
It is the series’ best constructed plot moment, and it makes The Lost Metal feel urgent rather than merely conclusive.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — The Wax and Wayne series at its most adventurous and ambitious, with world-expansion, villain revelation, and ensemble character work all firing simultaneously.
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