Welcome to another round of "Liz writes reviews where she comes to terms with books".
I devoured Cold Magic and Cold Fire, the first two books in this trilogy, last year and have been...if not eagerly awaiting the conclusion, at least excited about it when I could remember there was life outside of work and exams. Elliott did not disappoint - I admit, I wondered how she was actually going to wrap up all the plot threads before the end, but perhaps the sign of a good epic fantasy novel is one where the plot always seems to overfill the boundaries of the book and the sign of a good author is that she retains control over everything nonetheless.
So I definitely enjoyed this series - I still maintain that this is one of the most intricately developed and fascinatingly crafted fantasy worlds I have read in a long time and the knowledge-hound in me is delighted every time I get a reference or figure out why something happened the way it did. But Elliott is also skilled at not stopping the plot to tell you everything and understands that the world has a certain amount of mystery in it as well. She also understands the unwritten rules for magic in fantasy - magic has to have rules, but it doesn't have to make sense. This is all a very long way of saying that Elliott knows her genre well and is one of the masters of the craft.
Which brings me to my second point - Elliott has successfully written an epic fantasy without the traditional chosen hero. Cat, though she is a wonderful protagonist to follow around, is not the chosen one, born to save the world. The battle for the fate of the world is not about good versus evil, it's about stagnation versus progress. And there are very few truly evil characters in this book and, even when they appear, they are not taking the roles you would expect. So while the trilogy focuses on struggle for the fate of the world and the battle of the resistance fighters against cruel oppression, Elliott grounds it not in supernatural evil but in the natural struggles of nations towards individual autonomy and democratic power. Which is awesome.
So why four stars?
It's a problem of character. And it's not that the characters are badly drawn (they are delightful) or stray out of character (they never do), but that they read to me as characters, not as people. This is not a rare problem in epic fantasy and I sometimes wonder if it's just one of those things endemic to the genre. At any rate, I found both Cat's inner monologue and most of the dialogue to be...not-quite-as-real as the world she was in. I had this sense, and I don't know why, of "people don't really sound like that or think like that". I wish I could articulate it better and I want to emphasize that this awareness had surprisingly little effect on my enjoyment of the book. I still think this is one of the most interesting, well-crafted and, frankly, brilliant epic fantasy novels I have ever read. But while the world of the Spiritwalkers came fully alive to me while reading this trilogy, the faces and voices of the characters did not.