CBR16 Bingo:
Part One – The first 300 pages.
Part Two – The second 300 pages
And Also… Part Three – The last 300-odd pages.
It was a long book.
Bryce is lost in another world, separated from Hunt and her friends and utterly shellshocked from the horrific knowledge she has gained about the Asteri. To keep everyone and everything she loves safe, she will have to figure out how to destroy – and that’s if she can manage to find her way home first.
I read the first two books so long ago that I decided to reread them before I tackled this one. It was slow going at times, but I’m glad I did, because despite each book in the series being at least 800 pages long there’s massive amounts of lore and world-building packed into practically every page. It’s a good thing I was reading on a Kindle or I’d have been lugging around doorstoppers for the past couple months.
The first third of the book felt slow as we almost tread water with some characters’ storylines while waiting for others to reach the point that they could line up and continue forward together. That there’s a lot of dense lore to absorb in this section does not help matters. But after that point the book really took off, jerking me around with cliffhanger after cliffhanger as we careened between characters. I felt like I was watching a TV show featuring an ensemble cast.
Sometimes the heroism was just right and sometimes it was cheesy, but you always felt for the characters. The action scenes continued to be excellent. And the writing was visceral enough that I got genuinely grossed out by the gore and general jerkery on display at times.
I did miss the slyer Bryce of the first book – in this book she’s less compassionate, and every problem is a nail to hammer in with Starborn power. Still, it’s hard not to sympathize with her singleminded drive to tear down all the constricting structures of her world. And there’s plenty of other perspectives to balance her out.
The conclusion was left surprisingly open-ended, but then I hear there will be at least a fourth book coming out at some point. This might be a decent stopping point for readers who wish to get off the ride. I however do plan to continue on, if only to tie up a few of those loose ends. But I don’t plan to read all the preceding books in preparation again!