Two people who understand and align with each other so deeply that no matter how annoying or messy or dramatic either gets, the other is still standing beside them with pom-poms wearing a shirt that says “I’m with—>”.

I love this book! great conclusion! fewer issues! really grew to love all the characters and the way the story ended! ( )

I love this book! great conclusion! fewer issues! really grew to love all the characters and the way the story ended! ( )

Things finally get dark and scary in this third instalment of the Lynburn Legacy series. Continuing from the cliffhanger of the previous volume, which left us on a really disturbing note, this book opens with Kami and her friends scrambling to come up with a plan to combat the impending confrontation with the town's evil.

This is a surprisingly dark and absolutely heartbreakingly brutal book that really delves into the relationships between the characters, testing their friendships and loyalties. The book explores the sometimes delicate and changing nature of relationships, and how circumstances can have a huge affect on them. There are all sorts of relationships represented here-- romantic, soulmates, parent-child, friends, classmates, neighbours... In a way, I felt that the sorceror plot was often secondary to the shifting relations of the characters. It also strikes me that a major theme of the series is about family, in all senses of the word. Unlike most YA novels, the parents of the teenaged characters are heavily involved in the plot, and are given room to develop their own personalities and histories.

I was a bit irritated by Jared and Kami though. They had a lot of drama, which were based on very obvious miscommunication between them, but I suppose this is very true to teenage romance. I can't really expect inexperienced daters to know how to communicate with each other but it did make most interactions between the two of them quite exasperating to read about.

I liked that the author touched on the idea of evil itself-- that there is the abstract idea of evil, and seeing evil being done to others, and then there is the evil that directly affects you and your loved ones-- the characters experience some real terrors in this book that really ramp up the sense of horror and fear. Of course, that means there is also a very potent thread of grief and fear and death that runs through the entire book, as bad things happen to the characters. This made for an extremely emotional book overall, particularly in the second half, and the book remains very tense up until the very end.

The storyline was very unpredictable in this volume-- there are many twists and turns and unexpected developments, with characters making some completely unforeseen decisions. Even as I neared the end, with not many pages left, I still couldn't see a path to a resolution; I had no clue what the author was planning. But Sarah Rees Brennan is an author you can trust, for when the book did end, it was a wholly satisfying conclusion that wrapped up everything quite nicely. ( )

This scrapes into a 3-star rating primarily because I really do like these characters, and when Brennan wasn't stalling the central romance's development with unfinished conversations and mind-reading misdirection, she explored some other, very lovely relationships and presented a rather entertaining denouement...even if it could have arrived on the scene 100 pages earlier. ( )