What a great ending to this series. Endings are so tough. A bad ending can deflate the whole experience of a narrative. A good ending ties everything together, and nothing can beat that feeling of satisfaction you get as all the threads are tied up, secrets revealed, and connections made. Also, though, this was brutal. I’m not saying I haven’t read books that aren’t more of a bloodbath than this one is, because I have, but the body count is large, and people you love […]
The penultimate volume.
This is the one where you get all of the answers. And they are good answers! There’s nothing so satisfying as a series that poses lots of interesting mysteries, then gives you compelling origins and solutions for all of them. Also, when some of those answers manage to surprise you, and re-contextualize what you thought about the story previously. Clockworks opens with a strange flashback to the Revolutionary War, and we learn at last the origin story of the Keys. And so too do Kinsey […]
Bite Me
The Historian is like a cross between The Da Vinci Code and Dracula. It’s partially an update of Stoker’s classic tale, utilizing the scarier-than-fiction stories about Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes-the man upon whom Dracula’s legend is based. It’s also about a Robert Langdon-esque race to find priceless historical relics…before the bad guys get to them first. Throw in some father-daughter bonding, centuries-old secret societies waging quiet but brutal war and an old fashioned-love story, and you’ve got a pretty thick book. If that sounds intriguing, […]
This series is book crack.
“Hello, lover.” Read back to back to back with the other two books, Kings Rising is a great series ender. All three books together create a massively compelling read. This is not a perfect book—there are actually some pretty big flaws up in here—but at least in terms of the emotional satisfaction possible to get from the story, I think Pacat really nails it here. This trilogy consumed my life for the three to four day period I read it in. I know that time frame would have been shorter […]