Review Detail

First things first: THE COVER CHANGE!! why do authors change the cover in the very last book of a series? WHY? It makes me not want to display the books on my shelves and that makes me feel guilty about the books feeling left out. Gaaaaah!

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Lauren Oliver really redeemed herself in this book; it was full of action for the most part and I felt like the story progressed really well. As always, the defining quality of this book was how gripping it is.

What I liked:

- Lena being called out on her mistakes and faults; I think Lena’s worst quality is that she can be whiny and childish a lot of the time. I don’t mean to say immature because I don’t think that, I just think she has a problem with overreacting and behaving childishly in some situations.

-I mentioned in my Delirium review that a huge chunk of these books seems to have been “inspired” by The Uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfeld and while that continues to be true I liked that she veered off from what I expected in a key point in the story. I was really expecting Julian to end like a certain character in the Uglies books “Zane” and it was a pleasant surprise when it didn’t.

-Hana eventually turned up SOMEWHERE in this story, which leads me to my main objection about this book:

What I hated:

- That Hana was only now being mentioned. I felt like I had spent the entire second book wondering where Hana was and by the end of Pandemonium, I was sorta over her. I had accepted that she’s just not part of the picture anymore. Then exactly half of the third and final book is told from Hana’s perspective which I didn’t need. I felt like she was being introduced back at a time when there were other more important things to worry about and that bugged me.

-The ending: not the actual ending but the writing itself. There are a couple of paragraphs at the very bottom of the last page written in a voice that didn’t feel like Lena’s. It felt like the author was talking directly to me and it shattered some of the atmosphere, certainly broke the spell of fiction.

I could have done without the bottom half of that page.

Overall impression: I liked it quite a bit, actually. It was interesting and it made me read all the way to the end and that’s more than enough for me.