Sorry guys, took a few days off. Reading with a sinus infection pretty much makes me fall asleep about two pages in.
The Fate of the Tearling by Erika Johansen is the final book in the Queen of the Tearling series. We pick up with Queen Kelsea a captive of the Red Queen in return for sparing her city from war for three years. Kelsea is now without her sapphires and at the mercy of a ruler who is slowly losing her grip on her country.
While the queen is gone, the Mace and the Tearling must overcome hunger, overcrowding, threats from the church and an evil beyond imagining. But can they do it without their queen?
The final chapter has begun and the fate of the Tearling is looking grimmer with each passing moment. Can Kelsea save her country and can she ever hope to find the better world William Tear imagined all those years ago?
Man guys, this one was long! It was long and a lot happens. So be prepared when you go into it. I don’t really have a lot of comments for this one. I do have one gripe that will probably not be popular, so get ready for a rant.
Unlike the first book, this one has a lot of different narrators. We see quite a few perspectives and we get several different storylines running at the same time. We get so much–so much story, so much action and so many loose ends and yet, the way the story ends… it is almost like all these stories you’ve got so invested in don’t even matter. I’ve never read anything like this before. The author was able to tie up the story with a fairly satisfying ending and yet not address a single one of the loose ends from any of the narrators other than Kelsea.
By the end of the book none of the other storylines matter because they basically don’t exist. Don’t get me wrong, I was surprised by the ending and I can see how it comes full circle… in fact, I am not sure it could have ended any other way. But I also felt like I invested a lot of time in the characters and not getting to finish their stories was somewhat of a disappointment.
One thing this book does well is address larger themes of society and makes you question what a society should look like. It makes you think about what could be done differently to make a better world and it makes me question whether or not such a society could ever be achieved. This book asks the question and that isn’t a bad thing.
Overall, this was a really interesting series. It was built layer upon layer and the fact that Johansen could keep this world straight without getting his readers caught in a convoluted web of detail and politics, was successfully done. This one gets 3.5 stars from me and the series as a whole would land somewhere between 3.5-4 stars.
That’s all for now!
-M-