To start, I just want to say that I really enjoyed this series. The tone and writing style were very similar to The Hunger Games, but in a world that made more sense.
I knew that Morning Star would be concluding the series, so I looked forward to seeing how everything wrapped up. The book starts about a year after the ending of Golden Son, with Darrow’s escape from the Jackal. It was a nice place to start and it put Darrow in a different place than he’d been for most of the series. For the first time in the series, Darrow had truly been defeated, not just minor defeats or setbacks, but an absolute failure. At the beginning of Morning Star, Darrow is a different person.
The change was for the better. Though, at times, he slips back into the old mentality, he’s never really the same Darrow as he was in the first two books. That alters his relationships with the other characters. Some of them deepen, while others fall away. To make matters more complicated, there are betrayals and deaths that were unexpected. All these things added to the realness of the book, and I never felt like certain characters were being protected by the author.
The story is a little more convoluted than the previous books. It was still enjoyable and well-thought out, but I felt like it could have been tightened a little bit more. The action scenes are enjoyable, but they weren’t quite as clear as in the previous books. The ending was somewhat expected, but the way it happened was not, and that’s about as good as I would expect in this kind of novel. The epilogue felt a little contrived, but that could also be because I wasn’t paying as close of attention (I’m thinking about going back through the last two chapters again, just so I can really focus on them. I was a bit distracted at the time). That may be the biggest criticism I have of the book. After the climactic battle, it didn’t grip me enough to keep from getting distracted.
I’ll say again that this was a very enjoyable series. Each book was enjoyable on its own and really added to the series. The books built on each other and led to a wonderful conclusion that was very satisfying to read. It gives me hope that Brown’s new series set in the same world will be just as good.
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