Very bittersweet to say goodbye to this series. I’m so torn on this final book. The ending was technically what I wanted (my big ships happened), and there were some really fantastic scenes, but I think a lot of character development was pushed aside to make room for an excessively complicated plot. In some ways, I think that was true for the Camelot years as a whole. The first trilogy did such a fantastic job balancing character growth with high stakes and intricate plot, but this trilogy felt very heavy on setting up the plot (by the time they found the big answers they were looking for, I still felt like I was waiting for someone to say “Wait, Nope, that’s not it” because that happened so often). Especially towards the end, it seemed the big internal struggles the characters were facing were “fixed” kind of suddenly.

I still love this series (horrible, horrible fatphobia throughout aside), but the conclusion left me wishing for another book or two of just the characters growing and learning without secrets upon secrets and twists upon twists.