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A review by eggcatsreads
The Ending Fire by Saara El-Arifi
5.0
The groundbreaking ending to this trilogy. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time and loved every second of it.
It’s so hard to end a trilogy in a way that feels like closing the story in a thematically complete way, and yet The Ending Fire pulls it off perfectly. Mostly told through the multi-POVs of our main characters - Hassa, Jond, Anoor, and Sylah - we follow their separate journeys as they have to prepare for a war where they will all meet on the battlefield. Perhaps as allies, perhaps not.
The romances done in this book felt real and genuine, and honestly I was surprised by how much I liked Jond in this book as compared to the other two. I liked him! I didn’t want him to die during the battle! His chapters didn’t annoy me! It takes a skilled writer to take a character who I didn’t like during the first two books and allow him to grow as a person until I enjoyed watching his journey throughout this novel.
Also, I really enjoyed how the last section of this book was written for the battle. I won’t spoil it, but it really brought the big picture into a much smaller window to get a glimpse of everything going on during all the chaos. So often I see authors struggle with battles and wars and they get lost in too big of a picture, losing the impact of anything that happens. That does not happen here, and while it was written in a decidedly different way than the rest of the book, I felt it really added the personal perspective to everything going on and made the battle feel like it was going just as quickly to us (the reader) as it was to the characters, without losing any of the impact.
Overall, if you fell in love with this story and these characters during The Final Strife and The Battle Drum, you will love how this trilogy ends and feel complete by the last page. It’s so hard to wrap up a story as completely as Saara El-Arifi does here, but so often throughout this book I was connecting story threads from both the first and second book to see them finalized here in the third. I don’t believe that there was one thing left unfulfilled with either character or plot threads that were woven throughout this trilogy by the end, and I will be holding this trilogy in a special place in my heart for years to come.
A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine/Del Rey for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
It’s so hard to end a trilogy in a way that feels like closing the story in a thematically complete way, and yet The Ending Fire pulls it off perfectly. Mostly told through the multi-POVs of our main characters - Hassa, Jond, Anoor, and Sylah - we follow their separate journeys as they have to prepare for a war where they will all meet on the battlefield. Perhaps as allies, perhaps not.
The romances done in this book felt real and genuine, and honestly I was surprised by how much I liked Jond in this book as compared to the other two. I liked him! I didn’t want him to die during the battle! His chapters didn’t annoy me! It takes a skilled writer to take a character who I didn’t like during the first two books and allow him to grow as a person until I enjoyed watching his journey throughout this novel.
Also, I really enjoyed how the last section of this book was written for the battle. I won’t spoil it, but it really brought the big picture into a much smaller window to get a glimpse of everything going on during all the chaos. So often I see authors struggle with battles and wars and they get lost in too big of a picture, losing the impact of anything that happens. That does not happen here, and while it was written in a decidedly different way than the rest of the book, I felt it really added the personal perspective to everything going on and made the battle feel like it was going just as quickly to us (the reader) as it was to the characters, without losing any of the impact.
Overall, if you fell in love with this story and these characters during The Final Strife and The Battle Drum, you will love how this trilogy ends and feel complete by the last page. It’s so hard to wrap up a story as completely as Saara El-Arifi does here, but so often throughout this book I was connecting story threads from both the first and second book to see them finalized here in the third. I don’t believe that there was one thing left unfulfilled with either character or plot threads that were woven throughout this trilogy by the end, and I will be holding this trilogy in a special place in my heart for years to come.
A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine/Del Rey for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.