It actually hurts me to say this, but Children of Anguish and Anarchy was a huge disappointment.

After waiting almost 4 years for the conclusion to this trilogy, I find the final instalment malformed and rushed. 

I was immediately not a fan of the enslavement parallels at the very start of the book and by almost 20 chapters we were still fighting to get off the boat after being captured by a brand-new enemy who had not previously featured. We all know how much I despise the slave narrative and while this was not a central focus of the book, having this magical Black cast in this type of bondage for so long admittedly made me dislike it a lot more than I probably would have. The author has taken everything that was magical and special about this world and its people and joined it into struggle and plight and I hated that about this. 

Where this book ultimately doesn’t work is that it is completely disjointed from its predecessors. Everything about Children of Blood and Bone and Children of Virtue and Vengeance seems to be completely forgotten. Characters are gone, motives disappear and even certain people are literally killed off so that we don’t have to deal with them anymore. It genuinely feels like this plot was an afterthought and simply inserted just to bring the series to an end when no thought on how to do so had previously been established. 

The pacing and quadruple POV’s create a choppy narrative that even though I have found to be better for reading in previous stories, just made this feel too fast and unrealistic. Zelie is meant to learn how to control her new powers from new allies  and I have no idea how she did it. I felt like they spent more time beautifying her then actually teaching anything which made everything feel sacrificial which I didnt care for. At one point, someone says theyd trained for 9 days but were suddenly capableof taking on armies. The rituals didnt make sense. The villain deaths were super easy and i had no clue how they were travelling back and forth so easily across the oceans. 

While there was a solid attempt at worldbuilding around Orisha, I'm not entirely sure where they are and how the two worlds are connected. The use of their language while wonderful to see included felt unnecessary because you can't pronounce them anyway. I wanted to feel more connected with this and whenever a book has too much of a language I don't understand, it takes me out of the story.

I hated the ending and while I understand that you might not always get the ending you desire, this did not feel well thought out enough for it to be accepted as the ending that was needed. The deaths felt transient and unfair and the sacrifices hollow in order to pander to current tropes.

I will always be grateful to the author for paving the way for mainstream Black lead fantasy but unfortunately and to my utter heartbreak, the conclusion was not as mighty as the people it portrays.