Oh mannnnnnnnn I really liked this one. Bravo to the whole series! I enjoyed the way the twists and reveals worked themselves out in this final book.

I am glad Naomi Novik remembered how to write a novel rather than a worldbuilding essay in time for the third book. And I am glad I stuck with the series. While the first and second books explained their fictional world at length, we finally get to explore it. We literally travel around the world and really get to the bottom of it, each revelation more disturbing than the last.

El's snarky narrative voice is at its best in this book, and I found her character growth convincing, especially regarding her growing appreciation of her mother's choices.

Enough has been said about the political allegory - it is clever and terrifyingly true.

Really enjoyed the first two up until the ending of the second which was confusing and seemingly nonsensical. Glad I stuck with it, this was everything I loved about the earlier books and the book two ending was fixed in book three as well.

I love latter books of a series that cause you to have horrifying realisations about the earlier books, and this had them in spades. 

Great conclusion to the trilogy! It left me wishing for more books not because the story wasn't done, but because I just thoroughly enjoyed it and want more. 

This book feels like putting together the missing pieces into a puzzle; it's a satisfying ending to a masterfully written series.
I have only one controversial take that cost the book the 0.25 star:

I decided that Orion Lake needed to die.

Novik has done it again; it’s a worthy finale for the series.

What the hell, Novik did it again.

I was getting really frustrated with the first half of the book. At least three times, a character would say a couple of sentences and then El would explain a ton of inferred details to us for several pages. We had some important plot threads established, and pages were ticking by with no progress being made on them. El spent a lot of time not doing a damn thing, thinking for pages about how she didn't know what to do. There was a decent chunk spent on her wanting to accomplish something I thought was extremely stupid and didn't understand her motives - and then, at almost the 50% mark, the chess pieces were finally all on the board and the game began.

I kept saying to myself "there's no way she can solve [plot thread] in [pages left]" and then she DID over and over again until I had every answer I wanted. I actually want to go back and reread the prior two books knowing what I know now, because the reveals in this book were set up long before she started drafting it, there's just no way. It is a little bit of a spoiler to say this, so just skip over it, but watching El walk away from Omelas made me cry. In this present moment of multiple genocides and an ongoing, stubbornly-ignored pandemic, it hit me just right. "You got us all out for good, and they're trying to start a war over the bones. There's a better way. We know there's a better way. And you're trying to find it." 

I absolutely hate disliking books. It honestly causes me physical pain because I love stories and I want to love each story I come to. But every so often I pick up a book that is just too painful, frustrating, or disappointing to like — and I’m so very sad that this has been the case with The Golden Enclaves. Especially because I absolutely adored the first two books and had every expectation that I would love this one. 
Unfortunately, there are a many number of things, characters, story elements, and plot choices that I found underwhelming but what really disappointed me the most was that all of the character development we saw in El over the course of the first two books was completely undone in the first half of this one, and then not adequately built back up again by the end. This left me feeling like I didn’t know her, which is not how you want to feel at the conclusion of a series. So many of the things I had come to love about her (such as her resilience, her discipline, her strong foundation of morals, and her journey of personal growth that allowed her to let people in) either faded into the background or completely flipped. She lost her voice, her passion, her ferocity, her community, her drive. And that just wasn’t realistic, interesting, or relatable for me. Not only that, but it made me really really sad. 
The wrap up regarding the creation of enclaves and how that is tied to malia was interesting — but the conflict with Ophelia, the revelation of the prophecy, and the resolution weren’t enough to make up for the other ways I was really disappointed. 
Finally, I love Orion. And I truly believe he deserved better. Not just from the other characters, but from the author. 
Honestly, really heartbroken with this one, guys.