We made it to the final book in the Bone Witch Trilogy! Despite my enjoyment of the previous two books, The Shadow Glass felt like the weakest of the trilogy. That’s mostly due to the continuing dual timeline and how Tea uses her hard-won Shadow Glass. 

While the dual timeline worked well in the past, in Shadow Glass it felt more forced upon the story, rather than the best tool to tell Tea’s triumph. Instead of being excited to find out how point A arrives at point B, I felt impatient and sometimes confused. The time difference between the Bard and the Tea is incredibly miniscule. If I remember rightly, the time difference starts as a couple months and narrows to a couple days. The short gap made the time split feel artificial to the narrative, and any reveals would have had the same amount of twist and tension with a story in chronological order. The most confusing part was during the dual battle sequences. The same characters fought in the past and the present in short order, and I literally gave up figuring out anything besides who won. I understand Chupeco wanting all three books to have the same format, but Shadow Glass needs a much bigger, longer plot, and consequently older characters, to warrant the use.

What truly soured me to Shadow Glass was the ending.

Tea uses Shadow Glass to delete magic from the world, in the same of “equality.” Her thinking was that magic gives gifted people unfair advantage over the ungifted. Better to take away the gifts so nobody is special. It’s the equality of a blunt instrument, of a black and white thinker, of the selfish and vainglorious who dare not dwell on their consequences. Yanno, those people who opine that we’re all the same, and would erase, flatten, and violently assimilate minority populations. This “solution” is so incredibly naïve that I thought my audiobook file had gotten corrupted or something catastrophic had gone down to force Chupeco to write that. Listen. Magic may be dangerous, but the entire Eight Kingdoms healthcare system relies on it. Licht needed magic to reform her body to what her mental image of her body is. Infrastructure, water sanitation, and food supply depend on magic in this world. Hundreds died in the war, but thousands must have died without magic to support them. Wouldn’t it be better to create a robust legal system so magic users who harm others are brought to the same justice as everyone else? Offer free ethics classes? Campaign to end the weird ass child soldier program? Tea’s decision catapulted me out of the story and left me wondering if she is, after all, a villain.

Outside of the ending and dual timeline, I really enjoyed the book. Chupeco nailed the love themes. All types of love continue to have equal narrative weight and value. Love motivates heroes, villains, and nobodies. Licht’s coming out storyline was a special delight, and how she takes her identity at her own pace was great. I think I will still point to The Bone Witch Trilogy as a solid example of Young Adult high fantasy, but the ending is worth an asterisk. I’m excited for Chupeco’s other work and will put on my TBR!