Ahoy there me mateys!  There be spoilers for the other books because this be for book three so proceed at yer own peril. This is getting five stars all over the place.  Not from me.  This was a very uneven read.  Part of the weirdness was the pacing.  I had chapters and character povs that I wanted to read and others that were a slog to get through and some that I hated reading altogether.  The strangest thing was that Lin went from being me favorite character (by far) to being irritating and whiny.  I wanted a decisive leader and didn't get that.  She seemed to be making horrible choices the entire book and not using her intelligence at all.

Jovis, who I hated in book two, ended up being a more interesting character in this one.  I loved the two year time jump that began the book in how it affected his character.  His struggle to come to terms with his actions and fight the magic was engaging and I ended up rooting for him the most.  Though I think the author could have done way more with Jovis' use of lies to .  And of course Melphi was the highlight of the book for me.

Ragan's chapters were also infuriating because he is so one-dimensional with all hate and no thinking.  I didn't like reading about him or Sand at all.  Though Sand I could at least sympathize for somewhat.  Though her teaming up with Ragan really made no sense.  Neither did Ragan's survival in several keys parts of the book.

The Ranami scenes with the Shardless Few were lackluster.  If fact the Shardless Few resolution really didn't make a lot of sense either and kinda got dropped in the final conflicts of the book.  This was especially true for how the Dione's narrative resolves.  His stated goals contradicted each other and his role peters out during the final showdown.

The author made some interesting choices with how the war ends.  I enjoyed Lin's decisions in that regard.  I did not think the logic behind the reason for witstone and alanga magic made any sense.  How to take down an island was absurdly easy.

Overall the major problem with this book was the separate povs never really come together satisfactorily.  The internal logic failed in multiple ways in trying to bring the series to a conclusion.  And I didn't like the magic water which served as a deus ex machina.  I will read more of the author's work though based on the parts of this series that I loved.  Arrr!