Final installment in this impressive trilogy. It's certainly not perfect, but it's an impressive conclusion to a series that was so vast and planet spanning that it would have been difficult to write any sort of plausible ending. The fact that Brown produced this in just one year after Golden Son is astounding. In his words:
Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures.
I'm not going to be particularly careful about spoilers, be warned.
Darrow's escape from his implausible prison (I really don't think your hands would work anymore if they were pinned behind your back for 9 months), is an action packed start to the novel. We learn the secret of how Darrow and Ares were betrayed, and it's well set up, a thoughtful and plausible treachery.
There's so much uncertainty in Darrow about how to proceed. I couldn't imagine it making sense any other way, but it's powerful writing to see Darrow scared and adrift:
“Of course I’ve a plan,” I say, because I know it’s what he needs to hear.
But then comes the ridiculous part. Sure, the power dynamic is weird because Sevro had to take the helm while Darrow was gone. But inserting him as a junior member on a team for supply runs, sabotage missions etc. is just ridiculous. You don't put the heart and soul of your rebellion, who people just died to rescue, on high-risk low-reward supply runs. You just don't.
The worst part was that this all came with an incredibly tedious training montage complete with dumb initiation rituals (finish the bucket or get the box!). It would have been much more impressive to have the Reaper commanding in his emaciated state: he isn't going to win the war with his own muscles....ahem...
The scene where Reaper ends up accidentally fighting Mustang is dumb. He could have stopped it immediately by saying his name, but instead we get the silly:
Shout my name, something, if I had even half a second to breathe
But eventually we start to get somewhere interesting as Quicksilver comes into play:
“Look where we are. In space. Above a planet we shaped. Yet we live in a Society modeled after the musings of Bronze Age pedophiles. Tossing around mythology like that bullshit wasn’t made up around a campfire by an Attican farmer depressed that his life was nasty, brutish, and short.
They gave these screens to us as chains. Today, we make them hammers.
And it seems like there is a clear path ahead again, so of course it's promptly destroyed in an incredibly brutal way. Offing Ragnar just at the point where he was incredibly important was fairly shocking. The obvious path forward is gone and Darrow has to do it the hard way. There's some great moments in this anguish:
When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.
And some silly ones, like most of the Way of Stains sequence. We then need to suspend disbelief that the sons of Ares could move an entire planet's population under Gold control without being noticed:
In twenty-four hours, they will move eight hundred thousand human beings in the greatest effort in Sons of Ares history.
Thankfully Brown turns it around with an incredibly powerful parley scene between Roque and Darrow:
"This Society is not without fault, but the hierarchy...this world, it is the best man can afford."
"And it's your right to decide that?"
“Yes. It is. But beat me in space, and it will be yours.”
The ending has some fairly obvious twists, and stretches the believable in some parts, but is generally well written and a solid conclusion to an impressive trilogy.
4.5 stars.
