IMHO, nothing about the virus/vaccine makes any scientific sense, and I’m not buying the hand-wavy “Olympias was ahead of her time and ours too” stuff; I’m particularly irked by the bemusing courses of action Avery settles on. What in the world makes her think that destroying the cure would be more likely than not to prevent the Saxons from unleashing the virus rather than a shortsighted annihilation of a perfectly viable Plan B in case they did? And I also wasn’t a fan of the rapid alternation between the vulnerable demographic: from the world at large to just Circle members back to the world at large. The last-minute twist also seemed highly underdeveloped, if not pointless.

A lot of the major characters made choices that seemed inconsistent with my understanding of them, while others left me indifferent because they were flat and thus I had no such understanding to begin with. On a related note, Anya seems more like a four- or five-year-old than seven — at such a young age there is in fact a huge difference — and beyond that, more of a plot tool/accessory than anything else. The main and minor romances also seemed propped up by reader assumptions, based in part on mainstream tropes and progressions.

All in all, I was absolutely not impressed with this not-so-Grand finale. (insert reaction gif of Gordon Ramsay shaking his head: Damn.)