I finished this one back in February, shortly after reading the second novel in the series, so my memory is a bit lighter on details. This final novel follows the same five POVs as the previous novel (two were added in the second novel) and thus shows all sides of the pending battle. Elvar is in the middle of some of more interesting and far reaching plot points from a political perspective even if Orka remains the best character. Gudvarr remains that villain you love to hate because even from his own perspective, he comes off horribly while constantly justifying all his actions. I feel like I wanted more from Biorr – in the previous novel, it was understandable why he might have fallen in with the crowd he did. The group’s methods were horrible but the alternatives were lives of slavery or secrecy. He also seems introspective at various time – I didn’t think he would get a full redemption arc but think I wanted a bit more and earlier than what did occur.
Overall, I think the second novel was the strongest of the trilogy – one spent a lot of time on set up (which isn’t a bad thing but when you have a multi POV narrative, you also just want to get to the point where those characters come together and start interacting) while this leaned heavily on big sweeping battles for its conclusion. Nothing wrong with that, either, but I guess I thought there’d be more twists or political maneuvering to balance with the epic battles of the end.
That isn’t to say there weren’t political moves and changes to the world order that had been getting set up since the beginning. There were quite a few character deaths as well so the ending comes at a heavy cost. I don’t know, I think overall, it was fine and I’ll definitely check out more by the author (seems like one of his earlier series has really strong reviews) but ultimately, maybe I was expecting something a bit more groundbreaking than what this ended up being … and maybe it was unfair to expect more from the novel (and trilogy) than it ended up being.