The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam is the third and final book in the series that began with The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy. It was one of my most looked forward to books of the year, and while it was my least favorite of the three, it still has that Megan Bannen way of approaching a story that I love. In her Fun Author Questions with Powell’s Books Bannen talks about loving to mash genres together so that we can all have fun in seeing how expected tropes and mechanics come together in unexpected ways, and the set up of the world of these books as well as the people at the middle of this story do just that. A tall, immortal woman and the pocket-sized academic man she fancies is not what we usually see. Nor is a woman over a hundred and fifty years old given license to be “young”. We also rarely get a secondary romance of a couple who parted for good reasons years ago being forced to spend time together with the fall out that accompanies that. And we certainly don’t usually get four romances in three books as the secondary romance has been there the whole time.
And that all just picks at the surface. Megan Bannen moves the timeline forward in The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam and it took me a bit to wrap my head around where we find the characters we’ve already met in the previous two books (and while being 7 years in the future serves its purpose, it felt like an awfully large jump from the previous two books). The portals into Tanria are failing, there’s vines that only Rosie can see, and our main four characters find themselves trapped and need to get back to their lives… but do they want to get back to the ones they left?
Bannen writes big, tough emotions and characters who step up in their own lives. Like in The Undermining of Twyla and Frank this book is told only from our female lead’s perspective. But similarly to how I felt about that choice in the earlier book, I wished we were in more than just Rosie’s POV. Bannen isn’t afraid of the darker emotions for her characters, and while Rosie’s internal struggles about her immortality and her relationship with her father are big and there, they just didn’t hit me the same way that the big things in the previous two books did. This is still however a great trilogy, and I hope more people fall in love with the world and its characters.
3.5 stars.
Bingo Square: Border. The border between worlds being impassable is central to the story.