BooksOfTheMoon

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really have that high expectations of this after the other two books in the series, but I think it may have been my favourite of them. Despite a huge eye-roll at the way the last book ended, this one picks it up and runs with it. Séverin appeared to betray his friends and ran away with Ruslan, the patriarch of the Fallen House to become a god, but he left a secret message with Laila, which she immediately destroyed after waking up, in a fit of pique. So now his friends don’t have the clues he left them.

Of course, they figure it out anyway and the story is mostly Séverin trying to redeem himself against the anger of Laila and Enrique; Hypnos was all too willing to forgive, and Zofia understands what he was trying to do. So after the gang gets back together Séverin spends most of the time (when he’s not smugly solving mysteries) making big puppy dog eyes at the others.

The big bad didn’t really feel all that much of a threat, the main plot driver was the quest to find the maguffin (it’s no less a maguffin for being a location rather than an object). There’s some great sequences en route (I think the big wall on the island, after the lake was my favourite) but it didn’t really feel to me that the characters got that much development. Poor Hypnos, once again, gets hardly any time in his head (although he did get at least one PoV chapter this time) despite being one of the more interesting of the group. Laila is mostly just angry and brooding, and a driver of the plot rather than an active participant. As usual, Zofia and Enrique were great fun (is anyone else getting a bit of a Parker and Hardison from Leverage vibe from them?), although there was no single moment as great as Zofia on the glass stag from the last book.

The ending was interesting and somewhat unexpected. Other reviewers didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t actually mind it too much. It definitely had more melancholy than I was expecting, but still, a good conclusion to the series. I don’t think it’s one I’ll reread but I don’t regret my time spent with it, and it went out on a high.

So it turns out that my worries about this being too grimdark for me and make me nope out of the series, a la The Kingdom of Copper, didn’t come to pass. While I rolled my eyes as Séverin’s descent into full emo-dom (all he needed was some black eyeshadow), he, and the rest of the crew, never became so unlikeable that I didn’t want to spend time with them.

So in this volume, the crew, aided by the Matriarch of House Kore of France and the Patriarch of House Dazbog of Russia are searching for a book called The Divine Lyrics, which the Fallen House thought could be used to become gods, and which Séverin secretly wants to use to undo his mistakes, and maybe even bring Tristan back from the dead. Yeah, he’s deep in the ‘denial’ and maybe ‘bargaining’ stage of grief at the moment. Tristan’s death has changed the dynamic amongst the crew as a whole. They are sadder and less united than ever, but they’ve got to pull together for this one last big heist.

Despite Séverin’s overblown angst, the character I possibly felt most for was Hypnos. He’s trying his best to fit in and be part of the group, but they never see him as one of them. And neither, it seems, does the author, who never gives us chapters from his point of view, unlike the others. I hope this changes in the next book, since it feels like Hypnos has earned his place in the group by now. And despite his surface layer of charm and easy manner, I get the feeling he’s someone who’s deeply insecure and needs to be part of something bigger than himself.

I didn’t feel Laila got an awful lot to do in this book. She was there mostly to both angst towards Séverin and be a source of angst for him. I hope she gets to be more active in the next book. Zofia and Enrique continue to be my favourite characters, although even they don’t escape the veneer of gloom that has overlaid the group, with the former looking much more towards her ill sister back in Poland, and the latter thinking about revolution and freedom for his native Philippines. Although Zofia does provide one of the best images in the whole book, as she charges to the rescue, atop a stag made of ice with a flaming sword in her hand. It’s magnificent!

With time ticking away until Laila’s nineteenth birthday, and the prophesied date of her death, the last book has a lot of plot to play with, but also a lot to tie up.

In Belle Époque France, at the end of the nineteenth century, Séverin Montagnet-Alarie is bitter that his inheritance as the heir to one of the great hidden powers of France was stolen from him. Then he is offered a change to recover his heritage, and he gathers his unlikely band together to pull off the heist of a lifetime.

So this book wasn’t about “getting the gang together” for the heist, as I thought. At the start, they’re already a well-oiled team, having “acquired” many artifacts in the past. Each of them has a reason for being where they are and doing what they do. Whether it’s engineer Zofia who doesn’t understand people, but does understand numbers, and has a debt to pay; or historian Enrique, whose mixed heritage leaves him an outsider wherever he goes, and who hopes that if Séverin gets what he wants, it will offer him an in. And then there’s Laila, dancer and baker extraordinaire, searching for a hidden book and hoarding her own secret.

It wasn’t until I came to review the book on GoodReads did I see that it’s classed as YA, which sort of explains a few things. Firstly, the characters are all young: in their late teens or early twenties, and second, there are so many strong emotions flying around. It was somewhat exhausting to read, but then I’m a guy in his forties now, when things are a little more sedate than when you’re a teenager and have All The Feels.

I’m a bit worried by the ending, that this might be a case where the rest of the trilogy delves into miserablist territory. I had that with City of Brass, and never made it past the second book because of how miserable it was and how much I hated all the characters. Given the end here, I’m a bit worried that might happen here too (although I hope I could never hate Zofia or Enrique). I’m still going to give book two a go though.