Previous book here. A lot of the review will be below the spoiler cut for spoiler reasons.
I note that I got this book however many months ago and yet I have slowly dredged through it all that time. You'd think I was in 2020 again, and while I'm in depression funk, that's no excuser. I'm not sure if I just found a lot of this hard to wade through or what, because it was somewhat slow going for me even though I was interested...I note that as the revelations started happening, though, I got more and more into it. I think this book is very well done in finally finishing out the history of the world and how everything came about, and how and what El can do about it. But it felt slow going for maybe 60% of it, so that's probably why I'm giving it about 3.5 stars. It's got a nice finish, it just took awhile.
Spoiler cut time....I'm gonna discuss the whole book down there with no hiding of spoilage on any level (at this point, I can't hedge and review the book), so take note. I don't seem to be in a great mental place to describe the whole thing after weeding through it for months, so if this review doesn't cover it well, here's a few other reviews to read.
Spoiler space
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El makes it back home to England, and then does her damndest to get the heck back to the Scholomance and rescue Orion. Well, it's reasonable to assume he was dead, he's not, but he's pretty messed up for awhile. And the book has El traveling around the world, reuniting with classmates/friends and/or saving some bacon, figuring out the whole sutras thing, and finding out how those enclaves are really built. As you'd guess from this series, it's by doing horrifying things. I love how this book takes Grandma Deepthi's prophecy about El destroying all the enclaves and makes that a GOOD thing, and also explains why Deepthi acted the way that she did--of all the bad options, what she did was the best one, for a reason. Justified.
We also find out why El and Orion are opposites of each other/created the year after major shit happened, and it's that his mother installed a maw-mouth IN him...and thus El the destroyer of maw-mouths should need to destroy him. Or not, because she figures out a way to get rid of the maw-mouth while keeping him alive, and it's beautiful. So I'm happy for her. I'm not entirely sure if it's great that he'll be tied to a revamped Scholomance and they only will see each other during breaks because she'll be traveling around killing mals, but he doesn't seem to mind, so....ok? (Pirates comparisons seem legit here.)
Anyway, while I found this kind of slow going to read (I keep saying it....), the revelations in it were great, it has a happy ending and a bright future. I enjoyed that very much.
Other than pace, the only other critique I have is that I must say that there's one completely random, out of nowhere plot point where El and Liesel, of all people, randomly boink (twice?!) and then never, ever have any follow-up on that again. Why was this here? What was the point? I don't know if it counts as "cheating" on Orion when they aren't like officially A Couple under the circumstances, but it didn't make any sense, didn't really ever match El and Liesel's previous or subsequent relationship, and I don't get it. Was it for diversity points to make those two be bi? I can think of no other reason. Orion gets short shrift for the most part due to plot reasons (a bit of a bummer, but I get why), so until the end, there's no real romancing, and eh....that could have been better.
I would also like to state that I'm grateful AF there was no pregnancy in this one. I expected it, it didn't happen, WHEW.
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