Is it a letdown if you expect it to be bad?

These were never going to be high quality books. I’ve read and reviewed the first two and I know this and yet somehow this finale bummed me out with its not-good-ness. It wasn’t that I had high hopes, it’s that I had low expectations and it still fell short.

I finished Hero at the Fall less than a week ago and I’ve already forgotten what happened except that it all mostly worked out in the end (go figure. Very few books in this age range get as dark as killing off the sweet little sister at the very end of the war) Like she was all noble and shit and sacrificed but it all still magically fell her way. There were a few character deaths, including of one character that I almost kind of liked, but they weren’t much more than a bump in the road. The courtly intrigue was just not that intriguing. Hamilton tries to build up pathos for her main character, but every twist is pretty eye-rollingly obvious.

You can only read through so many perfect coincidences before you just give up entirely, and that happened way too early in this book. The first two fell squarely as guilty pleasures – I read them and knew they weren’t good but I enjoyed them. This one, unfortunately, lost the pleasure part of that equation. I just wanted to power through as quickly as I could and be done with it, kind of like how I’m doing with this review.