I can't remember the last time I started and finished an entire trilogy in less than a year, much less within a single month. But something about Brown's heavy metal pacing, chest-beating storytelling, and open-heart mentality (balanced with a steady feed of political nihilism) absolutely took me over. I've already talked about my nitpicks with his writing and how he tends to limit himself, and those don't change much with this third outing. Neither does his ability to craft a helluva ride, though, as Morning Star, despite having the clunkiest plotting of the three, is still a sucker punch of a page-turner. The fact that the ending fell more-or-less flat for me only reinforces how much the rest of the book's many successes worked for me. Brown writes his best action sequence yet in the second half of this one—it might be one of the best examples of sci-fi spectacle I've encountered in a novel in a very long time—and his penchant for writing balletic carnage remains second to none, arguably. I lost track of how many times I was audibly hooting and/or hollering during these fight scenes.

My issue is the plotting, but unlike my issues with the plot of Red Rising, which was too familiar at times, Morning Star stumbles over what seems to be a self-inflicted race against time. As exciting a writer as Brown is, he writes this book as if the ground were falling from under him, and I don't know why. There are at least two books worth of plot here, and only one of them really pays off by the end. I started to get nervous when I had 80 pages left, and we still hadn't started the proper climax. The climax we get is solid but rushed, and the mechanics behind its construction and pay-off were so obvious I spotted them from the jump, and nothing in the subsequent execution convinced me it was the best way to carry things across the finish line. After the breakneck pace and thorny conflicts of Golden Son, I was a little let down by how formulaic or truncated parts of Morning Star were. Characterizations occasionally felt self-indulgent, like Brown was catering to caricature versions of his cast to give his fans some love. I'm not opposed to fan service, but its use here doesn't entirely work for me. 

What did work—outside of everything I already talked about—is the continued emphasis on the messy, ugly contradictions of war and the ethics of a "hero" whose path to freedom is drenched in blood. Darrow's aims are just, and I love how the series isn't afraid to use its righteous anger at a vicious system to commentate on our world. But Brown is smart enough to highlight how any revolution will look evil from someone's perspective. He pulls off a tricky balancing act (in this book especially) between the thrills of a hero taking down an oppressor and the horror that such a victory necessitates. This might've been a rockier read than I'd hoped after the incredible high of Golden Son, but it did little to dull my eagerness about getting to the next series of books. If Brown can continue to iterate on his storytelling and iron out some of the kinks, his series will very likely earn itself a high spot on my shelf of all-timers.