After the cliff-hanger book 2 ended on I wasn't sure what to expect from this book but it very quickly surpassed all expectations I had. This is my favourite book in the trilogy by far and expands the world outside the scholomance. I really enjoyed El's friendships which once again were more prominent in the story given Orion's ...situation. I also thought the plot twists in the story were amazing - Novik is just an incredible writer at everything she attempts it appears! Prepare yourself for some mild emotional devastation though as some of the things revealed really got me (in a good way though!).

A stunning conclusion - to a brilliant trilogy - that

makes sense of the events of the first two novels and clarifies El’s purpose

. Novik’s magical world is desperately dark, but protagonist El and her people are tenacious in their pursuit of a glimmering, golden hope for a better future.

What a conclusion! It was a pleasure to be back in El's head once again, for pages upon pages of internal monologue. Honestly, if you've gotten this far in the series, you know what you're in for. It was another book of exactly that. I have to say, I liked the ending with regard to the fate of a certain character. Without getting too much into spoilers, I think I can say that Novik foreshadowed enough to make that result believable. But I believe she also could have written the opposite result and made it work just as well. It really could have gone either way, and I felt that her choice was logically and thematically backed up by the rest of the novel, building up to that pivotal moment.

The book starts off slow, as El processes the fallout from the last epic cliffhanger. I actually really appreciated the fact that Novik kept us here, mired in El's feelings, until she was finally ripped out of her own head and forced into the greater plot. Of course it wasn't pleasant to read. It was a devastating description of someone falling into depression, which is a completely realistic reaction to everything that had just happened. Much of the Scholomance trilogy is an examination and deconstruction of common YA fantasy tropes, and this part was no exception. If you were unsatisfied with the romance in this series, I suggest you step back and ask yourself what Novik might have been trying to say, on a meta level, when she wrote it the way that she did.

I didn't find the real-world setting to be as compelling as the school setting of the previous two books. I understand why the scope had to be expanded in order to facilitate the plot, and I thoroughly appreciated the story that was told(especially the horror twists), but something unique was lost when we left the Scholomance behind. Every student has to graduate one day, though. This is a trilogy I can definitely see myself picking up again to revisit in the future.

Not sure how I feel about the ending and the pacing. It seemed like this could have been two books, and a lot of side characters fell by the wayside (Chloe, Magnus, Liu, etc). For a final book with a lot of ground to cover, I felt too much time was spent building a relationship between Liesel and El. Not the relationship itself, but that time could've been used to a better purpose. REALLY not happy with how things ended for Orion. His entire arc was learning how to be a 'person' and not 'a hero who kills monsters' but then ended up choosing to spend his life away from loved ones and killing monsters full time. Disappointing tbh.

My life is different now. Novik is directly up my alley and into my lizard brain.

This book also feels extremely relevant to our current moment, for all that it's about wizard kids who don't know how to use phones. It's also about the little ways we hurt everyone and how we justify it to ourselves, and about how ultimately it's not justifiable. I'm in a daze thinking about climate change and capitalism after finishing this book (and series) and I probably will be for weeks.

This would make an excellent double-feature with  "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."