Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Sweet Far Thing, by Libba Bray

The Story: This is the last book of a trilogy.  If you haven’t read the first two, but plan to, you may want to skip this part.

This starts pretty soon after the last book left off.  Gemma and Co. are returning to Spence Academy after all that crazy stuff went down at the end of Rebel Angels.  They get back together and try to get back into the Realms.  They can’t.  They’re freaking out.

When they do finally find their way back in, Pippa seems creepy and she has a band of girls with her that Gemma and Co. befriend.  Gemma has all of the magic from the Realms and the girls use it for various things, none of them particularly useful.  Everyone in the Realms wants a piece of this cake, but Gemma isn’t ready to let go yet.

Gemma is having crazy visions of a lady in a purple dress.  The girls run around tricking people and doing crazy things.  The Realms are kind of going crazy and Gemma and Co. try to figure out how to fix it without destroying everything that they’ve done so far.

What I thought: I was seriously disappointed in this book. I really liked the first two but found this one almost unreadable.  It drug every thing out so far that I just lost interest.  ”We went into the realms. Then we came back. Then we went back in. Then we came back,” over and over and over.

By the second half of the book, when the action picked up, I didn’t even hardly care anymore. I just wanted it to be over.

To be fair to Libba Bray, I do enjoy her writing style and I liked the characters and how they were changing and growing. It tied up all the loose ends and had some good surprises. But these didn’t make up for all of the flaws.  This was my least favorite book of hers that I have read.

Conclusion: While I didn’t love this book, I did enjoy the series as a whole, so I still recommend it.