I've been thinking about having super powers recently. Really. I mean I've been thinking about them before I picked up this particular book. 
 Well, that might not be entirely fair, because I've being thinking about super powers, more or less, since I was, um, well, I don't know since when. Since I was pretty small though. 
 My son was the same way. He once believed that he had a version of X-Ray vision when he was small. He would stand there, in the middle of the room, and blink his eyes as rapidly as he could. It looked like, at first glance, like he was having a seizure. 
 But no, he wasn't using his newfound powers to peer through wall, through people, through our souls. I remember deciding that it was time to put some of his abilities to the test. Actually, he only claimed to have the one... but I recalled that his adult plans at the time were to be a ninja (to be perfectly honest, he wanted to be a WHITE ninja, which I considered omitting, because it sounds so racist, but I recall that he explained that it was just the color of their ninja outfits, and that it meant the wearer was a good guy. Whatever, I still think it was racist, but now it's out there, you can decide if my then 5 year-old was in need of cultural sensitivity training). 
 A ninja that could see through walls, that's hard core. So we set up a series of tests to see how he'd do. 
 I'll spare you the drama. He didn't do so well. Turns out he can see through glass pretty well, as long as it isn't colored, tinted, frosted, or warped too severely. Things that are opaque, he doesn't do so well. 
 But I'm glad we did it. It showed that he wasn't just lying about it to try to impress me. He really convinced himself he could see through things and was willing to accept that he couldn't once the results came in. 
 Having powers though, real ones, I've decided that would be a horror movie. Hard to explain why, but this book does a fair job of it. I know I read the first in the series last year when it came out (I'm a pretty big fan of Sanderson, so I'll read most anything with his name on it), and while I gave it a good rating, I think, I felt like it was one of his weaker works. 
 This one though, I enjoyed it a lot more. I'd give it a 4 and a half stars, if such a thing were possible. In this world, something gifted regular 'ol people with powers, and a side-effect, with no exceptions, is that it drives any practitioner of said powers absolutely evil. 
 Our hero, young David, is a reckoner, someone that fights the powered beings - despite having none of his own. 
 I started to think about how having the sort of power that some individuals in this series have, and about how that sort of ability probably would drive me mad. Of course, for me it would be a bit of a God complex, and not magical evilness. But still, it was something to think about. 
 So, without going into my chain of logic of how I came to the conclusion, I'll just state that I'm convinced that anyone that ever exhibits any sort of superhuman abilities should probably be avoided. 
 Anyhoo, I'm getting tired of typing. The book is good. Real good. You need to have read the first one before this baby though. And like I said, I enjoyed the first one, but nowhere near as much as this one.