I love this series and I love Beka Cooper and I love the Tortall books. I even loved a great deal of this book. However, there was one thing that happened that ruined it for me (everyone who's read this book immediately knows what I'm talking about). Honestly, the first time I read this was right after it came out and I was so excited for the series finale. The twist at the end shook me so bad that I gave it one star immediately because that ruined the whole story and all the characters for me. Upon reread, I don't think that was really fair. There were a lot of good points about this book and the one bad thing doesn't entirely negate everything, just a lot of it.

Positives: I still love Beka. I still love mysteries. The prince has been kidnapped and she must find him using her scent hound and that's fun to me. Like it's a fun story and there's a lot of discussion on slavery and what that means, especially child slaves. I just really like it overall.

Negatives (apart from the one bad thing): I think the romance in this was rushed. I do quite like the romantic lead and his relationship with Beka, but I think it needed to be slowed way down because I found it hard to buy into and get invested. Beka has never been a character who begs and it didn't make sense that she was begging him. I also think it was a bit in poor taste that it happened immediately after her fiance was killed. It was just one of those things that didn't need to happen. There was honestly no reason for her to even have had a fiance since he seemed mostly irrelevant in this book and had literally never been mentioned before.

I think the diary in this was a bit of a struggle as well. Because of certain events that happened, Beka was unable to keep her diary for a significant period of time. A lot of the writing in this book is done "much later" from her memory. I don't mind that the diary elements of these books has always felt a bit ridiculous and completely undiary-like. For me, that's better than the alternative of it actually reading like a real diary. But the form really felt like it was being stretched to the limit here, to the point where it did bother me.

It also got a bit boring at points, which was an issue I had with Bloodhound as well. In this she's tracking the prince through lots of wilderness. Exciting things happen, but there's only so much riding and camping and complaining about swamps and bugs and such that I can really bear. I honestly liked Terrier much more for the sedentary nature of it. The traveling bored me, and they were constantly traveling.

Now all that aside, this probably would have been 3-4 stars for me, much like Bloodhound. Had some issues, but still a good story. However. The bad thing. Dear god. I can't remember the last time I read something in a fiction book that made me so angry. I'm not someone who gets upset because of stuff like my favorite character dying. I mean like, I might cry, but I'm not going to get mad at the book or the author. If their death makes me sad, that's good. The author is doing something right and I enjoy that I've been made sad. That's the type of reader I am.

In this book, a character does something stupid (that's basically the vagueness I'm going with because spoilers). I'm not mad that a beloved character did something stupid, I'm made that it didn't fit with their character, it didn't fit with the story, it didn't make any sense. The first time I read this book, I wasn't even initially upset. I was just confused. Like sure, it's "justified" through some whatever explanation, but the explanation does not logically fit with this character and this world and this situation. (At least in my opinion, obviously it's all subjective.) I thought reading it again I'd be able to pick up clues and foreshadowing early on and I did, but it feels so forced. It feels like the kind of thing Pierce thought of early on and decided she liked it, so she forced it into this book even though it didn't fit with the character.

It was one of those things that made me mistrust the author and the storytelling. Not because my favorite character did a stupid thing, but because a character who has been developed over the course of years and multiple books did something that made no sense for the development we've seen and their past actions.

Spoiler

No one will ever be able to convince me that Tunstall, who literally turned down promotions because he liked being a street dog, would have attempted to murder Beka. Let alone everything else.

In all honesty, I will probably keep rereading Terrier and just pretending it's a standalone. I don't think Bloodhound is anything spectacular to write home about and the storytelling choices in Mastiff don't work for me at all. I can see why people enjoy this as a finale, but I can't get past the plot twist.

Reread 9/5/2020 via the Trini Alvarado audiobook

Not changing my rating because I love a lot about this book, but the amount of othering and racism is such a problem. I don't think it would be a full five stars for me without the nostalgia factor. The audiobook aspect was fine, but the accents are still not great. At least with this book there weren't many (or even any, perhaps) awful British accents. The Bazhir accent didn't really resemble anything recognizable so it didn't bother me as much as the British ones.

***

This book was as fantastic as I remember it. The relationships and romance in this book are what make it truly special to me, and it's the romance in this that I remember from the series as a whole. The rest of the story is a departure from the main arc of the books, but Jonathan and Alanna's relationship in this was just masterfully done.

The white savior trope is a huge problem in this book, though. I was too young when I originally read these to understand it at the time (though I did notice it in some of Pierce's other work), but it's pretty awful here. The main reasons I left this at 5 stars instead of knocking it down for that were because Alanna does at one point recognize the strength of the Bazhir women and her own apprentices stand up to her in refusing to remove their veils (also nostalgia, won't lie). That doesn't solve the problem and it's definitely something to be discussed when this book is read, but it was still 5 stars for me.

So I started this book on May 1st (according to my Goodreads updating which tends to be fairly accurate). It's now September. It wasn't even that I was picking this book up occasionally. I just never wanted to pick it up after the first fifty pages. The only reason I did finally go back to it was because I'm trying to clear out my currently reading shelf. The strongest feeling I have upon finishing it is relief that it's not hanging over my head anymore.

The biggest issue for me was the writing style. Like I had issues with the story and characters and whatnot as well that I'll probably discuss a bit, but mostly it was just the writing. Everything felt so clunky.

This may be the first time I've ever fully appreciated the "talking heads" complaint. There were so many sections in the book that were nearly all dialogue, either back and forth between characters or just paragraphs and paragraphs of explanation. It was almost devoid of description, even when that description would have been necessary to link a scene together. The best example came from early on (bear with me, this is lengthy):

"Want to get out of here, maybe hit some clubs downtown?"
"No thanks," she said, looking around for her father.
Her father cut in at last. "He's an impressive young man, Alex. Why don't you like him?"
"Travis plays the perfect Southern gentleman, but underneath, it's all about Travis. He's always looking over your shoulder to see if someone more important is in the room. Besides, I hate bow ties."
A club steward approached them. "Excuse me, Miss Harrington. I have a phone call for you on the club phone. A woman says it's urgent."
Gladys's voice was tense. "I've got Carmela and her cousin and son in the car. The police let them go. We're heading to my place."

The whole book read like that, I didn't just pick one particularly bad section. There was no flow with the action, no description to link the different points together. The steward says there's a phone call and we cut immediately to Gladys's dialogue, not even a quick addition of "Gladys's voice on the phone was tense." At points it genuinely made the book a little difficult to follow because it was so easy to miss small things, like Gladys being on the phone instead of there at the party. And again, that's one small example and it wouldn't have bothered me had it not been indicative of the book as a whole.

Also, the dialogue was so unrealistic. That's not always something that bothers me a great deal because some people talk weird and I'm one of them, but these didn't sound like people at all. They sounded like they were announcing the plot as they went along rather than speaking conversationally.

Then it was just generic things like telling not showing. I didn't feel anything about this book. Everything was just told to me. Alex said this. Mike said that. Alex felt this. The cops did that. On and on and on. I never felt like I got a chance to experience this story because of the writing style.

But getting past just the writing into the story elements, it felt very soap opera-y. At one point they're hanging out in Mexico and this nobody reporter has a meeting with the Mexican present. I was so confused by that when it happened because it came out of nowhere and I kept thinking I was mistaken, maybe Dardess meant the president of the newspaper or a company. Nope, the literal Mexican president. And Alex didn't act like an adult most of the time. She's 25, but spent half her time worried about her parents finding out what she was doing. When she went to Mexico, she literally switched cars and paid cash so they couldn't find her. Like, she's an adult with her own apartment and a good job. I don't understand what her parents can do to her beyond cutting her off (although that good job covered all her expenses) or being generally annoyed. It didn't feel like the actions of the self sufficient adult she was supposed to be.

The main characters, all of them, also just got kidnapped constantly. For a bunch of human traffickers, they really sucked at kidnapping apparently. Like once or twice I could handle, but it felt like they spent half the book getting kidnapped and getting free again.

It also wasn't just the writing style that felt choppy, but the narrative as a whole. It's a pretty short book at under 270 pages, but there were 61 chapters. And a lot of the chapters switched between characters and scenes. We'd follow Alex then Mike then back to Alex then the bad guys. Each time it was only a couple of pages, maybe just two. It felt like there was never time to sink into the story.

I didn't really like the perspective from the bad guys. I've read plenty of thrillers that have used the villain's perspective to open up the narrative a bit, but it didn't really work here. The chapters that focused on Vargas, the head human trafficker, were really just him making plans or talking about how his plans were messed up. They didn't contribute anything to the overall story. I felt like had more time been spent on Alex and her life instead, I'd have maybe cared about her a little bit more.

I really want to add something positive just because I feel like I've been so negative in this review, but I can't think of anything. I really didn't like this book. I didn't hate it. Like it definitely wasn't a terrible horrible one star because the majority of my complaints were on the smaller side, but it was still pretty bad.

A caveat to this review: I'm thin. I'm sure that influences how I experienced this book.

I didn't go into this book expecting it to be straight body positivity and all about acceptance. I expected some of that, but mostly I thought it was going to be fat authors discussing their experiences. That is kind of how it was described on the back. It was partially like that, but so much of this book was just actively unpleasant. I was kind of okay to sit through that when it was fat writers discussing their own unpleasant thoughts and experiences, but there were a number of essays by thin authors that were horrible to read.

The standout was "Fat Like Him" by Lori Gottlieb. She is a thin woman who once dated a fat man and basically just treated him horribly because of his weight for the entire 40 pages of the essay until they broke up. And then she expressed no remorse and said her friends were full of shit for calling her closed minded. I'd like to give that particularly essay negative stars because it's one of the most vile things I've ever read.

There was also an essay about men who dehumanize and have sex with fat women and talk about how gross it is afterward and another essay written by a therapist who was incredibly fatphobic toward a patient. One essay was by a doctor about gastric bypass surgery and while the information about the surgery was interesting, his personal prejudice was woven throughout it.

But it seemed like a disservice to some of the other authors to rate this book lower than three stars because for every awful essay, there was an interesting one that actually did hold some insights for people's experiences. Some were really lovely to read. Pam Houston's and Donna Jarrell's essays ("Out of Habit, I Start Apologizing" and "Fat Lady Nuding" respectively) were both standouts. They made the book worth it, along with a few others that I found worthwhile.

I honestly picked up this book because I like essays and specifically noticed David Sedaris and Anne Lamott were among the authors, but Sedaris's essay was fine while forgettable. Anne Lamott's was beautiful, as is most her writing, and mostly focuses on her history of eating disorders, but doesn't really have anything to do with fatness.

But I couldn't recommend this book just for the awful essays. They, and Lori Gottlieb specifically who I looked up so I can be sure to never read her again, tainted this whole book for me. Which is disappointing because I do think a number of the essays were worth reading. If you can find Jarrell's or Houston's essays elsewhere, I'd recommend them if nothing else.

This book was such a good time. I don't read too many books that would classified as horror, and not much adult fantasy either, but this book was just about everything positive I had hoped it would be. It's violent and gruesome and cool and well written and full of interesting people who all have unique characters and motivations.

My only two negatives were both pretty small things. For one, the climax was a bit iffy for me. Like I know there has to be a big revelation at the end, but honestly, after all the murder and all the gore and all these characters we've grown to love have suffered so much, I didn't particularly care about the big moment at the end. It somehow seemed less than a lot of what had come before.

The other tiny issue was just the amount of science included. Sometimes I got a little lost in all the science talk. But also, the cast is literally just a bunch of scientists all crammed together on a boat doing research, so of course it's going to be science-y. It's hard to really blame it for that.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was the cast of characters. Every single one felt like a real person with a distinct personality. I so often expect horror characters to fall into tropes (which is really unfair and due to my lack of experience in the genre, I'm sure), but I really enjoyed them all here. There are a lot of moments in this book that are rather predictable and expected, just based on how the world works. If you decide to go swimming with killer mermaids, they will probably kill you. So as the reader, I wasn't always surprised. But despite this, all of the deaths mattered. They all meant something to me. I would so much rather predict what's going to happen and have it matter to me than be surprised at every turn and not care about the actual events.

I also just thought it was cool. Like the killer mermaids were cool. I liked how they were described and handled. I liked how the story unfolded. I liked that it wasn't afraid to kill people who mattered or end storylines just because the characters involved had perished. I really liked the writing style. This whole book kept me entranced the whole time. It wouldn't surprise me if this winds up as one of my favorites of the year. Everything about it was just so well done.

I'm obviously not super well read in the genre, but if it sounds interesting to you, I'd highly recommend picking this up. It was very well worth the time.

I really liked Sonya Sones, but this book didn't do it for me. I kept waiting for something in this book to connect, either the main character or her story or even her dog, but none of it did. (Well okay, I kind of cared about the dog.)

Molly meets a homeless girl and decides to get her home by Christmas. She also meets a cute boy and dates him. And she has anxiety over her brother not being around anymore. That's kind of the whole story and it doesn't really do much with that. It's definitely geared toward younger YA readers, as most of Sones books are, but I didn't find it as relatable or as real. It was just kind of dull.

It also did the very annoying thing where the main character has a secret she's constantly talking about but won't tell the reader. I get that there will always be revelations later in stories, but I don't want my face rubbed in all the things I don't know yet. Especially when it's so obvious what happened. It made me sigh every time Molly brought up "that thing that happened and I'm not ready to talk about yet" which felt like every four pages. Either tell me or don't talk about it.

Also, she kept interchangeably calling the dog a service dog and an emotional support animal, and I'm pretty sure there's a big difference between the two, both in their training and how they're treated under the law.

I dunno. This is the kind of book that I'm honestly never going to think about again. It wasn't bad, but it was definitely the kind of story where you had to connect to the main character and I didn't at all.

Reread 9/13/2020

I still just think this is a badass way to end the series. Pierce can write a climax. The romance for a lot of this book is super gross to me, though. Liam is at least ten years older than Alanna and constantly condescends to her, even calling her "little girl" at one point. I suppose when I'm read the physical books my eyes can skim the uncomfortable bits, but you can really do that via audiobook. Still great, though.

***

Honestly, I don't have much to say here that I haven't said in my other reviews for this series. It was a stunning end to Alanna's story. I loved the climax. This book is a bit longer and I think that works to its advantage, as it did feel like it had a little more depth than the others. But this is just one of childhood favorites and rereading it was a wonderful experience.

I liked this duology when I was younger, but never as much as the other Tortall books. And I'd definitely heard discussion of this in regards to the white savior trope. But I don't think I really understood how bad it was until this reread, since it's probably been well over a decade since I revisited these books.

But wow. Aly, a white girl, is transplanted by a god into a different country where she becomes a key part of the rebellion of the Raka people, the Indigenous people of the Copper Isles who have been subjugated by the white conquerors for centuries. Aly basically shows up and teaches them how to keep secrets and properly run their rebellion. She tries to teach them about race relations and how they should treat white people, which is really hard to suffer through when a rich white 17 year old girl is talking about this to a man who has literally been a slave living in his native country under racist laws for his entire life.

There's also black face and just a lot of general discomfort that I honestly can't remember in detail anymore.

Also some very uncomfortable discussions on slavery, and how all these lovely kind people just have slaves and treat them so well. If they treated their slaves that well, perhaps they wouldn't be slaves. But that's just a thought. There are also conversations on how some people prefer to be slaves than to be free and uh perhaps that's because they're literally slaves? There were so many points of this book that were difficult to suffer through.

But I dunno, I think nostalgia for this world and this series kept it at a three star for me. I do quite like the spying aspects. It's fun to see them plotting, and I do enjoy the rebellion aspects. But the race is handled so poorly that it really makes most of the book unpleasant.

This is about a 14 year old girl who has had a crush on her father's 29 year old best friend for years, and they eventually enter into a "romantic" relationship. It's super gross and made me cringe for basically the first two thirds of the book because literally all I wanted was one person to step in and realize what was going on. Like every time her parents said how adorable it was that she had a crush on Luke, while he's raping her like every other day, I wanted to shrivel up and die inside a little. Which is kind of a good thing, I think. When a subject is as gross as this one, I really want to feel how gross it is and be horrified by every line. Sonya Sones did a good job at that.

What I didn't like was the trajectory of the story. As it went on, it felt less real. The characters seemed like their personalities were being watered down throughout the book and the situation was getting easier to read. It started out complex and messy, but by the end it was as simple and clear cut as an after school special. That definitely lessened the impact on me a lot. I didn't care about the final third of the book.

I still really enjoy Sones's writing style, and I did adore the first half of the book. There were so many good things about this and I loved how much I hated it at times, in regards to the horrifying adult preying on a child. But the ending ruined it for me and I don't think it felt worthwhile overall.

There was so much I feel like I should have liked about this book, but it just fell flat in almost every area. Like it wasn't bad. I would never call this book bad. Honestly, if it sounds interesting to you, I'd recommend giving it a go. I just couldn't ever bring myself to care the way I really want to when I'm reading. Especially when it's such a character focused book, like this one.

Susan is an Indian immigrant who moved from Saudi Arabia, where she lived most of her life, with her mother to Canada. She meets a cute boy with a troubled past and also deals with her father's continued absence as he still lives in Saudi Arabia. Also, she wants to be an artist, but both her parents plan for her to pursue engineering or medicine. By that description it really sounds like there ought to have been something for me to connect to. I love reading about family drama, and I quite enjoy romance and teens finding themselves in spite of their parents' expectations.

But for whatever reason, I felt bored throughout this book. Perhaps there was too much going on or it was too cutesy or maybe I'd just burned myself out on YA contemporaries after reading too many. It also took me two months to read, so I'm sure that added to the disconnect I felt. Although, if I'd been enjoying it, I probably would have picked it up more than twice a month.

Ironically, the author's previous book sounds way more up my alley, so I'll have to give that one a go and hopefully enjoy it more.