A solid ending to the series. Once again the world will end in n days and it’s up to Sadie and Carter to save that day.
Really, it feels like the second half of The Throne of Fire. We have the same support characters, the same big bad, the same magic, and it doesn’t feel like that terribly much time has passed. Honestly, it’s not a bad thing; it’s just a little bit weird.
I don’t really have particularly much to add for Throne of Fire that I didn’t already say for The Red Pyramid.
Basically, more of the same. The Kanes have five days to save the world (it’s impressive how even something like that can start to get old after a dozen novels…). They proceed to do so.
Red Pyramid would be a lot strong if I hadn’t read Percy Jackson.
Don’t get me wrong. Red Pyramid is still a fine book, although it feels like it’s written for an even younger audience than Percy Jackson.
I really liked this book.
Throne of the Crescent Moon follows a band of somewhat unlikely heroes as they’re off to save the day. You have an old ghul hunter (one of the last of his kind), a whirling dervish (I’d never before looked up what that actually meant), an alchemist and her mage of a husband, and a shape shifter who can take the form of a golden lion.
A solid ending to a solid series. I think that I liked it more than Deadline, but less than Feed, owing entirely to one thing: George.
Yup, she’s back. Literally the last thing that happens in Deadline gets fleshed out (heh) in Blackout as we alternate once again between Shaun’s and Georgia’s viewpoints. It’s fairly obvious what’s happened (and a neat extension of what we already know about the zombie virus), but that doesn’t mean I was still rooting for her nevertheless.
I was curious to see where Grant would take this, after killing off a small pile of main characters in the first book. It turns out: somewhere right between what I expected and what I didn’t expect at all.
On one hand, Shaun is crazy now. He hears George’s voice in his head and answers her out loud. Everyone around him of course thinks he’s crazy, but they mostly seem to give him space. I’m not sure what I think about that. Shaun is still probably my least favorite of the main characters from the first book, which is certainly suboptimal, given that he’s the only one to survive… (Also, the Coke fixation is weird.) But why does everyone else keep him around?
A solid ending to a solid series.
I think Ruins actually managed to pull things together in a way without feeling (too) rushed that none of the other YA series recently have managed to pull off. The previous plotlines (Kira’s conflicted nature, the rest of the Trust, the cure(s)) all come to a head in a way that’s still driving enough to finish the series but don’t feel like the author was just phoning it in.
A good continuation to Partials. In this book, we see Kira start to come to terms with who she is as she sets off with Samm and Heron across what’s left of the United States in search of answers–only to find more than she was looking for. Meanwhile, Marcus is back home, stuck between two warring Partial factions, trying desperately to broker a piece.
It’s a neat continuation. I like watching the world expand, exploring more of what happened in the decade and change since everything fell apart. We’re starting to get some answers, which of course lead to more questions. I look forward to Ruins, cautiously hoping that Wells can pull everything together for the finale.
Quick and to the point, Isolation tells the story of Heron (who we met briefly in Partials) during the Isolation War. It gives a better picture into the Partials: how they are made, how they are trained, and why they might not only want to, but even been the right to, kill us.
It’s a good story and I hope to see more of Heron in the second and third books of the Partials Sequence. It’ll be interesting to see how she’s grown and changed in the intervening years and how she interacts with the other human (and not) protagonists.