Astrid Hawk

A satisfying conclusion to Ewilan's trilogy, and it set us up to learn a lot more about Salim's talents and adventures in the next trilogy. Camille/Ewilan matured a lot in this book - where she was more capricious and reactive in the first two books, she becomes significantly more reflective in this one and is often the voice of reason. It's perhaps a natural progression given all the deep responsibility and dark truths she's had to face, but the change is marked.

Salim, in contrast, doesn't mature as much, but he's thrown (as is the rest of the company) when his hidden abilities suddenly come forward in stressful situations. This book starts to take him away from his role as encouraging, upbeat sidekick and more towards his role as protagonist in the next trilogy. He does become significantly less flippant, however, and tends to be more morose and sensitive, constantly feeling overlooked and rejected, which became a bit irritating at times (especially given how Book 2 ends).

Since this is a middle grade / very young adult story, there are some heartstopping moments, but in the end it's all found/reunited family and happily-ever-after.

Read this for a Kindle challenge, and while it was certainly more enjoyable than reading one of the thousands of formulaic cringey romances on KU, it was... underwhelming. The synopsis makes it sound like the magical element in the baked goods is going to somehow play a critical role, but it is disappointingly not at all mysterious nor particularly pivotal in the book.

The plot was... fine. It's supposed to be a cozy, feel-good read, so it didn't surprise me that the stakes were never terribly high, even when there was conflict (and of course the 3rd act breakup, even though this wasn't a pure romance).

My biggest complaint with this book was the constant peppering of French words and phrases mixed into the English whenever bilingual French characters were speaking. It irritated me, since it was all French vocabulary that one learns in beginner French class, and a bilingual speaker would not bother substituting individual remedial words in their native language and then go on to use much more complicated sentence structures and vocabulary in their second language. For example, a French speaker at one point says "She wore une robe, a very beautiful dress...". Why in the world would she bother substituting "une robe" for "a dress" only to actually use the word "dress" in the very next part of the sentence? I realize this sounds nitpicky, but the novel is littered with examples like this that just grated on me. I have French friends... this isn't how they speak English.

Like the rest of this series, there were parts where this really dragged, with hours of descriptions of the characters wrestling with their emotions, and parts where there was intense action. This one had aerial dragon action at least, which was fun. The epilogue was a full 2 hours of narration... which is nuts, but I guess makes sense given the length of the total series. My biggest complaint is that one of the reveals really didn't make a lot of sense - it went directly against the very first scene in the series, and some of the events in book 3. Overall I guess it was a satisfying ending the series, with no obvious loose ends left - but I also didn't come away feeling like I was going to miss any of the characters.