Sam

Far from perfect. Darrow has gone from flawed to unlikeable. The pacing takes a while to land but the book ends strong.

DCC #5. A real inflection point for the series — it dramatically expands the cast of characters and opens the world up even more. Great book.

9/10.

Loved the epilogue and what it implies for the future of the series. Audette!

There was a lot going on in the last third of the book and it got hard to follow — but the ending made up for it.

Much more personal than Dune. Smaller in scale.

The Jihad as Paul experienced it — trying to escape it, trying to protect his family — is the heart of the book and it works. What's missing is the Jihad's effect on the universe. The race consciousness unleashed, the actual cost. We hear about it but never see it. Maybe that comes later in the series.

Brown's signature move — hiding Darrow's plans from the reader, then flipping your frustration into delight when the payoff lands — is at its most extreme here. A sequence that felt like a transparent plot device turns out to be exactly that technique in its most ambitious form: you've been played the same way Darrow's enemies have. When it clicks, it's genuinely satisfying.

The book has real stumbles. Some of the Rising's internal class dynamics don't feel narratively earned — the structural logic is there but the emotional groundwork isn't. There's also a jarring pop culture reference mid-book that breaks immersion completely at exactly the wrong moment.

But the core machinery holds. The Darrow-as-hidden-planner device is the engine of the whole trilogy and this is its fullest expression. Weakest in the middle stretch; justified by the ending. Best trilogy closer I've read in a while.

Still an absolute blast and even more so as the mysteries start to pile up and the meta story with the Syndicate and Borent company ramps up.