Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Whelp. About to make me some enemies here as I espouse some negative views on a most beloved series. I’m not even sure this review is for the readers here or more for myself as a therapy session but here we go. Spoilers ahead. I could cry. Seriously. I have long awaited this final installment. I have thought about this book almost every day for an entire year! Never have I EVER been so excited to read something. I even bought special editions and signed copies of these books. First off, let me state. I knew that Jude and Cardan’s relationship was pretty toxic in the past and though they ended up together in these books, I just didn’t see a relationship that I could root for by the end. They were both flawed and I hoped that once the story concluded, that they could mend those broken pieces within each other, but I was ultimately disappointed. We see a moment where Cardan essentially confesses to enjoying making Jude fear him (even though he’s ashamed to admit it). It should never be anyone’s desire in a relationship to make the other person uncomfortable or fearful. This was disgusting to me. We see in that same scene, Jude strike Cardan across the face in a moment of anger. I HATE when people who claim to love each other in books strike one another. If it had been Cardan striking Jude, there’d be hell to pay. Jude is forced later on in the story to make a choice about whether to control Cardan again like she did in book two or to set him free. She truly wrestled with this decision even up until the final moments before she decided to do the right thing. She KNEW that Cardan would hate her if he was enslaved again as a mindless being under her control. He trusted her to make the right decision and she had gall to deliberate on what was the right choice. Jude’s flaw has always been to be drawn to the enticement of power and we can see that most clearly in this moment where she deliberates when even love hangs in the balance. The book also felt like it was ramping up towards this conflict with Madoc but the final climax seemed to fall flat to me. Most of the book I felt bored with the pacing and there didn’t seem to be as many twists in this story as the books previous. I really missed the exciting “What just happened??” moments from before. Finally, I’m exhausted with authors pedaling political stances in fictional books, especially ones that are super divisive and in this case, horrifying. There is a moment where the sisters are talking about Taryn being pregnant and they try to persuade her that if she wanted to end her pregnancy, she’d be fine to do so; that babies are often unwanted, often aborted, as if that somehow justified such a wicked act. They told her if she wanted to end her baby’s life through abortion she’d be more than justified, praised even. Jude makes a comment that she’d cut off anyone’s hands who’d disagree. In that moment, Jude became the villain and I couldn’t look at her the same. She was worse than Madoc or Balekin who killed their wife and killed their siblings. She encouraged a mother to kill her own child. This is obviously a hot button issue in our country and I don’t need a book preaching to me about how I should feel about any issue, but especially this one. Finally, all I can say is that I can only feel ashamed for the time and money I spent investing in this series.