Quick-take: Glad it is over.

Dan's Review

WARNING: Very mild spoilers if you have not read the second book.

Essun continues traveling with her band of misfits to try to save the world and Nassun (her daughter), not necessarily in that order. Somehow, not clear how, her daughter has figured out the secret to saving the world and is headed that way too.

The only reason I finished this book is because it is the last one. This one dove into a lot of lore that I no longer cared about as evidenced by me stating in book 2 I had already rejected the premise.

I also reject the fundamental premise of Nassun. Essun is a super powerful orogene (basically, a magic user). To save the world requires a being of great power and those are rare. Powerful orogenes are created by mating other powerful oregenes. Nassun is the daughter of an orogene and a non-magic user. Why is she also so powerful? Theoretically, it could happen by her mom being powerful, but the book made it sound super-super rare.

One upside is the book finally revealed why portions of it are written in the 2nd person. I am not going to say why, other than the reason makes sense, but it happens at the very end. I had to get through the entire trilogy before that tidbit was explained.

There were some flashbacks of world-building and how the obelisks and aspects came to be and the ultimate Shattering.

Score 2/5. Anyway, it is hard for me to write a fair review because I simply stopped caring by the time it got to that. I only finished because this was the last book and I was committed at this point. If you were one who really enjoyed the previous 2 books, I think a fair statement would be that you'd enjoy this one too, but it was not quite as good.