After years of following your favorite characters. You’ve laughed. You’ve cried. You’ve screamed at them for every stupid decision they make. And then you come to the end. As everything must end at some point. Here are the series that I finished this year and I will miss.
- The Dark Artifices Series by Cassandra Clare – Another Shadowhunter trilogy in the books. It was good and I love that Cassandra continues to push boundaries and populates her worlds with diverse set of characters. I was kinda surprised on how it ended but as always with her books, one series bleeds into another.
- Caraval Trilogy by Stephanie Garber – It’s rare that I actually find a series as it’s ending but this one I hit at the right time and read all three back to back and I’m glad I did because I don’t think I would have liked to have wait to see how the Caraval ended. Even if only liked one of the sisters.
- Three Dark Crowns Series by Kendare Blake – This is like the Game of Thrones but mostly only the women in the kingdom. It had everything from palace intrigued to rebellions and betrayals and magic. It really kept me guessing to the end and really cemented Kendare Blake as one of those authors I just have to read.
- Legend Series by Marie Lu – Technically I’ve already said good bye to this series once already a couple of years ago but that was before Marie Lu decided she needed to close a few plots she left open and give us readers the closure we all needed.
- Renegades Trilogy by Marissa Meyer – Superheros with superpowers fighting each other is pretty awesome stuff. It was a quite ride as we follow our heroes and watch them debate who has what best for the city in mind. In the end, it was villains and heroes coming together to save the day.
- The Folk of the Air Trilogy by Holly Black – I’ve probably said this numerous times but Holly Black really knows how to write fairies. She just understands how they think or how they would think. This was a perfect ending to a really great series and she even seamlessly wove in her other characters from past books into the narrative without it being obvious or distracting. That’s a true feat.
- The Magisterium Series by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare. – Call and friends when through a lot in the year 5 years at the Magisterium. I kinda miss Call’s sassiness.
- The Charlotte Holmes Series by Brittany Cavallaro – Charlotte Holmes would have made her famous ancestor proud in how she solved her mysteries. She was truly a class above all else.
What Series did you finish this year? Comment below and let us know what series we need check out next.
So what do you do when you have the soul of the enemy of death even though you have no memory of his past life and now everyone else knows it and blames you for the death of your best friend but your innocent? For Call it means you get thrown in jail, broken out and then kidnapped by the very people who’ve been trying to avoid the last three years. Call’s luck is almost none existent. Call is also full of self doubt and guilt. He wasn’t the one to kill Aaron, that was Alex but he still feels responsible for it. If Tamara had chosen to save Aaron instead of Call it would have been Call who died and not Aaron. Does Tamara regret that choice? Call had always assume that Tamara liked Aaron more than him and like most people tolerated him because Aaron did. Now that Tamara, Jasper and Call are kidnapped by Master Joseph and his crew things get a little hazy. Call is not Constantine despite having his soul but he’s been having trouble convincing others of this. He may not be him but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t share some of his ambitions. Without Aaron, Call feels a little lost and maybe all would be forgiven and go back to what they were if Aaron was alive again. Master Joseph gives him the chance. Raise Aaron back from the dead and you can decide whether you want to stay or not. The Enemy of Death was called that because his obsession with defeating death. I’m not sure I buy that if Call is able to bring Aaron back that all would be forgiven and that all of a sudden there would be so much support for his cause but we need to find the conflict. Of course Call is able to bring back Aaron by doing the one thing that Constantine was never willing to do, give apart of himself to do so but you can never go back. Aaron is not as he was because he was dead and should be dead. Call’s plan to bring Aaron back and things go back the way they were goes sideways immediately and battle ensues. If I didn’t know that there is one more book left in the series, I would almost think that this was finale because there was a lot of loose ends tied up. I’m not sure where they go from here but there is still one bad guy still out there.
I’m a fan of both Holly Black and Cassandra Clare’s work so I was pretty stoked about their collaboration. I just wish it was better. It’s fine but not great. Someone pointed out to me that it’s a book meant for middle schoolers so I’m not the targeted audience but Rick Riordan writes for the middle schoolers and those are fantastic. Holly Black’s Spindlewick Series are also great. So I don’t think it’s the genre, I think maybe it’s the story itself. We are now in the third book and Call, Aaron and Tamara are now being honored for killing the Enemy of Death, even though they know the Enemy of Death’s soul is in Call’s body. Things get complicated when someone tries to kill Call and successfully kill a fellow student. There’s all the typical kid lit traits. The adults are clueless. True, they don’t know Call’s secret but pretty much every time they tell Call he’s going to be safe, he’s attacked. They allready have had one student and one teacher end up in cahoots with the big bad and they didn’t know it. Is it any surprise that there would be someone else also in cahoots living right under their noses? No, of course not. Typically, the kids feel they have do things on their own and typically it gets them in more trouble and typically when the real culprit is revealed the adults aren’t there so they get blamed for everything. At moments I really enjoy this book but at most times I think “is something going to happen soon?” I felt like there was a lot going on of nothing really happening until you get to the ending and then there’s yet another big cliffhanger. I will say this about this series in general, the cliffhangers have been first class. Too bad the rest of the book don’t live up to them.
2 Women, So Many Books 