Review Detail

Huh...well that was...anti-climatic. Review to come...really have to think on this one. Went from 4 to 3 stars now. I just can't stand to give it more. I need to dwell a bit more. Will write this review tonight or tomorrow.

Ok, so I am finally going to review this. I will be honest and say that it was really hard for me to rate this book. There are things that I liked about, a lot. But I think the things I didn't like about it outweighed those and it brought my rating down. It actually pains me to give this only 3 stars when I rated the first and second book so much higher. I guess I had very high hopes for this book and they were just thrown to the wind. So, let's get on with it. I will try my hardest to keep this spoiler free, but I have to say that if you have not read the first or second book you might be totally lost and you will definitely read stuff you should not know.

Blurb from Goodreads:
They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past.
But we are still here.
And there are more of us every day.
Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has been transformed. The nascent rebellion that was under way in Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight.
After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven—pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators now infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels, and as Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor.
Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings.
Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road.
And in the end, that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing.
Requiem is told from both Lena’s and Hana’s points of view. The two girls live side by side in a world that divides them until, at last, their stories converge

So I'll start with the cover. To be honest, these covers with the girls face on them are just ok for me. They aren't spectacular. They give me a picture of what Lena might look like and that's about it. They tell me nothing of the story, or what is contained in the book. I would like to see something that reveals those things a bit more.

As for the characters in this book, I don't find they are really well fleshed out. I don't find you get the depth from them that you had in the other books.
Now, as for Lena, I disliked her a lot in this book. She did so much growing in the second book. She became this strong, tough woman who learned to fight for what she wanted and how to protect herself. But in this book, she fell back from that, becoming a wishy washy, dependent, annoying teen who was torn between her two "loves". In all honesty, I wanted to slap her across the face for most of this book. I felt like she was trudging along hoping that things would just work out. She could not make a decision to save her life. And she didn't fight for what she wanted. In book 2 she was strong and determined, in this one she was weak and almost uncaring.
As for Julian and Alex, well, let's just say that you don't get much of them in the story. You get what Lena wants to show you, and it's not much. You get Lena's struggle to figure out who she should be with, when all along she knows in her heart what she wants but does not go after it. Totally frustrating and annoying. She pines away and crawls back into the shell she lived in when we read Delirium.
While Hana's POV was interesting, I truly found that it was not necessary to the story. I understand how the two stories collided in the end, but honestly, I didn't need to hear from Hana's POV. She brought nothing to this story for me except to fill in what seemed like what would have been empty chapters otherwise.

I can say that I truly love Oliver's writing. It's very solid. She really knows how to put words to paper and, for the most part in this book, keep you interested in what was going on. But in all honestly, the plot was thin and fairly unmoving. Nothing grabbed me and had me saying "oh my goodness, I cannot put this book down!" I needed to know what happened in the end and that was the only thing that kept me going. I was almost disinterested in what happened to bring us to that point.

As for the conclusion, did it answer questions, not really. It kind of just hung there having me wondering why I even read the book. There was no closure and since I know this to only be a trilogy, I can't think of why Oliver would not let it go out with a bang. It was reminiscent of Mockingjay's ending, which I thought was rushed and also left things kind of undone and unsaid. And the fact that we really got nothing about Alex in this story, well, that was really disappointing. I want to know what happened to him while he and Lena were apart. Where was the swoon worthy Alex, the one everyone fell in love with in Delirium? If you're looking for him, you won't find him in this installment. If anything, he is annoying and really made me mad for most of the book, when he even made an appearance.

So, overall, I was totally unsatisfied with this conclusion. I am disappointed in Oliver and how she chose to end this series. It's as if she ran out of steam and focus and didn't know where to go with what she created. I missed the heart pumping thrill and overworked brain I got with the first two books. It saddens me to have to give this such a low rating. In all honesty, after talking with a few other reviewers, I almost dropped my rating to a 2, but I believe that Oliver's writing really deserves better.

So, should you read this book? If you read the first two, it really is a must, in my opinion. I don't think you can sit back and not finish it out. However, I would go in with lower expectations than you might currently have because, much to my chagrin, this book is highly over rated by most.