We’re here, then we’re gone, and that was true before they came. That’s always been true. The Others didn’t invent death; they just perfected it. Gave death a face to put back in our face, because they knew that was the only way to crush us. It won’t end on any continent or ocean, no mountain or plain, jungle or desert. It will end where it began, where it had been from the beginning, on the battlefield of the last beating human heart.
Master storyteller Rick Yancey invokes triumph, loss, and unrelenting action as the fate of the planet is decided in the conclusion to this epic series.
| Amazon | ebook | 333 | Penguin | YA/Scifi | May 24th, 2016 |
Celebrate with me, folks… I have finished a series! I have so many book series I am halfway through and it’s great when I get to say- I am done and dusted with one of them!
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you have probably read my reviews for book 1 and book 2… If you have, you also know I loved those books! What was book 3 like for me? Read on, dear friend… read on!
The priest studies the dead man’s face, and his heart burns with rage and revulsion. The human face is hideous, unendurably grotesque. No need to hide his disgust anymore.
OK, so the book started off quite religiously (I even thought, please no, let’s not go the religious route here) and with a neat twist. I was so ready for this book, for this epic finale… but very soon, I found myself not as excited about The Last Star. The emotions I went through reading The Infinite Sea just did not surface!
The final book in the series is, simply put, action filled! It conveys the feeling of urgency in writing, in characters’ actions, in everything, and yet, somehow, the story didn’t move along fast enough. Honestly? In the few ending chapters, I found myself jumping paragraphs, thinking- yeah, yeah, we’ve been over this already, let’s just blow something up and be done with it. I felt like it was trying too hard to bring that deeper meaning into the story and it didn’t fit… not anymore… the bodies had piled up too high and the strong had met their breaking points.
I feel like The Infinite Sea was meant to create that unbreakable bond in between the reader and the characters, for that bond to stretch into the finale and yet, I didn’t get the same depth I was hoping for. I think the urgency around the action bled over to the deeper meaning I was looking for… and deeper meaning doesn’t mix with urgency. Deeper meaning takes delicate time and pondering.
You can’t trust God, either. Even God is a liar. He put rainbows in the sky as a promise he’d never kill everyone again, and then he let the Others come and do it. All the people who died must have prayed, too, and God said, No, no, no, seven billion times, seven billion nos, God said, no, no, no.
The Last Star meets its purpose, though… even if I didn’t love it 100%. There is a race against time. 4 days. Countdown. What can be done in 4 days? A lot… more death, more saving, more survival. There were, as always, some good time-stopping thought snippets in between the bodies piling high. A respite? An excuse? A promise? Hope?
Yes, in a way, looking back now on what I read, I can say that the human condition is still well and alive and kicking in this book. The messy humanity. But it felt out of place. The bloody Armageddon is happening- the time to pull philosophy filled prose is over. It is definitely not good to stop the reader in their stride in the middle of action… I don’t care about them versus us through symbolic mumblings, I want to know who pulls the trigger first. Who comes out alive on the winning side after the blast.
So, yep, the third book, the ending of the trilogy let me down a tad… Why?
Because in the end, even though who was meant to die, died, and who was meant to live, lived, the matter is far from being solved. The t didn’t get crossed and the i didn’t get dotted. All of this ‘laying everything on the line‘ and ‘keeping the promise‘… I feel like it was all for nothing! <spoiler> What I mean here is, why are there still Silencers? Why are there still enemies to fight with and survival to be done? I know, there are other bases like Camp Haven… </spoiler>
Yes, it got our characters to a certain point in time. Is this what life is? Fighting the bloody awful difficult fight only to have nothing to celebrate over? Is everything always about sacrifice? Well, what is the point at all, in this case?
The best hammer to break the bonds of distrust is natural human sympathy. Pity has killed more people than hate.
I feel like I am contradicting myself, or completely missing the point of the book. I get it- it’s the final showdown… kind of… but, it lost me in places, you know? It’s the Others, it isn’t the Others. Too many freaking variables to blow my mind. And, you know, I can also understand the ending… The world is a vast place, you can’t fix everything globally by changing something in one location. I guess, after the emotional turmoil I wanted a prize… like a dog begging for a dog biscuit after they’ve followed command.
Sigh… anyway…
Aliens are stupid. Ten thousand years to pick us apart, to know us down to the last electron, and they still don’t get it. They still don’t understand. Dumbasses.
My personal experience can be whatever in the grand scheme of things… the action was mighty and the ‘answer‘ was, in my head, logical. The why of it all… one could argue about. A timeless argument… everlasting…
Overall- it’s one hell of a trilogy! The idea is good, the characters are very, very good and the action is good. I love that this whole series is built on the clash in between human and alien, and that it explores the what ifs and the whys and the how do we go from heres… There’s plenty of meat on the bones of this plot and each and every book in the series has stood strong in its own right. I ended up a bit dissatisfied because I still have questions in my head… can you say I am a bit lost? I am sure this review demonstrated quite well how I don’t even know myself…
The 5th Wave series on Goodreads ¦ Amazon UK ¦ USA
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