Finale by Stephanie Garber

 

DNF @ 46%

There are some people on Goodreads who will try to make you feel like a lesser human being for rating books you didn't finish, but our time on this green earth is finite, and why should you spent it slogging through something you didn't enjoy just to be "worthy" of sharing your opinion? Here's the thing. I'm not a hater. I tore through CARAVAL in a day and delighted in how it felt like The Forbidden Game fanfiction. Was it melodramatic and over the top? Yes. Did the random Spanish names for this fantasy world make any sense? Absolutely not. Did I cackle at Maldito Castle? Oh, you bet I did. But I liked the book anyway because it told a fun story and felt like something I would have wanted to read or watch when I was fourteen.

The sequel, LEGENDARY, was not nearly as good but I still sort of enjoyed it, if only because it had echoes of what made CARAVAL so fun. But it also felt like a largely unnecessary sequel and did some ret-conning of the characters that raised my reader hackles and made me go, "WHY?" One of my pet-peeves is when an author tries to take an unlikable character and force the reader to like them by coming up with all of these mental gymnastics to excuse their problematic behavior over the previous books. And that's not being a writer, that's being an enabler: you should let your characters speak for themselves instead of trying to apologize for them.

I was a little loath to read FINALE because LEGENDARY ended on such a sour note. I wonder if the author initially intended to stop at one book and expanded the world because of demand, because the thing about the Fates felt like it came out of nowhere, and things get even weirder here. I also really liked the author's writing style in the first book but in here, it seems like it becomes a parody of itself. Like, at one point, she's talking about the smell of "candied citrine." CITRINE is a rock. Did you mean citron? And what is "tropical ice"? That sounds like a sports drink or a shower gel, but certainly not anything that exists in nature. But it's hard to tell because all of her characters seem to have a major case of synesthesia. They "taste" falsehoods and "smell" heartbreak (yes, these are real examples), and Scarlett has a dress that magically becomes more revealing when it gets excited in the presence of boys.

I stuck it out for 200+ pages but I'm not enjoying myself at all, so I think I'll call it quits here.

1.5 to 2 out of 5 stars