This was a better book than the last two at least; I’d hate to have the series end at the level it was going, or even worse. It was an interesting concept to have the last book be from Bastille’s point of view so that you got someone else’s thoughts on the events at large, and seeing as Alcatraz spent most of this book moping, brooding, and pretty much catatonic, it wouldn’t have made a very enjoyable read anyway. I will say that with Janci Patterson helping Sanderson write the book (or writing it completely based on Sanderson’s notes, I’m not sure), it read like a quickly written fanfic that didn’t get the author’s voice down 100%. Events were more sketched out scene vignettes than actual events, characters were blink-and-you-miss-them, and things got wrapped up really quickly. Like “why was that character even the Big Bad?” quickly. Never mind the great reconciling Alcatraz to his Talent; yes, apologizing is something we should all do, but it’s never that easy to just fix things with it outside of literature or movies: things take time to heal. And how the big battle ended (as cute as a horde of kittens might be) reeked a little too much of “the aliens can be killed by water!” Deus ex machina.
There were some good lines; the one where Bastille thinks that seeing as Attica Smedry’s Talent was losing things, and his wife Shasta inherited it as well upon their marriage, then what was lost must have been both their humanity and their ability to be good parents was in particular interesting. Also good, as depressing yet realistic it may be, was that both Bastille and Alcatraz never do gain anything close to a decent relationship with their parents. And yes, I do agree that it is ridiculous that authors frequently discuss their leads nearly wetting their pants in terror, yet they can’t write that those same characters might pause events to relieve themselves. Points off for the “beaten that dead horse so much it’s in a crater in the ground” straw puns; those could have ended after the first ten.
As reasonably enjoyable as I found the book (and as thankful as I am that for the most part the overly dumb humor and stupid chapter headings are gone), I still feel like this book was a slapdash write-and-publish to finish the series and end the fans’ uproar; apparently there was a 6 year gap between Book Five and Book Six, which set a lot of people off. I feel like those children who first read this series better not grow up to want to read A Song of Fire and Ice or something like that; because if this series took them out with the wait, then boy, is the literary world going to be a real shock.
Do I regret reading this series? Not particularly. Would I read it again? Probably not.