What a travesty the Aurora Cycle has been.
Rising - 2/5
Burning - 1/5
End - 2/5
I guess I can say the book matched the first one? That's positive in the least.
I don't know what the authors were thinking making this one a “time-travel” story. The tag line of “it's about time” is fantastic and made me interested but... mothercustard this one was also just not good and the one star extra is for Finian x Cat being adorable.
My reviews never contained spoilers but this one... oh yes, this one does because this book has made me genuinely angry with how wasted the potential was. It reminds me of a lot of M. Night movies that have an amazing premise but fail at everything else.
The Aurora Cycle and it's End is just that. It has some fun characters (Fininan, Magellan) and the story can be interesting at times... or I guess it could have but the way Kristoff and Kaufman took this is just stupid.
Aurora is terrible and good 80% (or even more) of her lines are either:
a) “Kal? Where is my SPACE ELF boyfriend? I miss Kal
b) I am the SAVIOR. I am the CHOSEN ONE.
c) Forgetful.
Did I say 80%? I meant 100%. They made the TITULAR character Bella from Twilight. Our elf Kal even had imprinted on her just like Jacob did to the monster CGI baby in whichever Twilight movie that travesty happened.
Kal is easily the worst character and has been since book 1 when I give it proper thought. His lines are all about Ben'shmai or ‘The Enemy Within' which sounds wince-worthy even when I try to imagine I'm thirteen. His fight scenes are lame.
Really, Kal should have died in Burning (book 2) to show the consequences of what can happen if Aurora fails her mission of defeating the plant-based villains.
Tyler, the Gary Stu of the group aka Goldenboy, is... OK. Except he starts a thing with a MASS MURDERER. Do we just forgive Saedii's self-admitted crimes? No: “I love you but you like... helped to kill billions of people. Sorry babe.” Jesus...
Finian and Scar are great this time around but I'm still salty that Finian, like ever character worth talking about, got a cishet relationship. Nope. You don't get a poly rep, an enby rep, nope. All you get is Mary Sue Zila being a lesbian with a character we've never heard of before. That's now how you do rep, you muffins.
The story is a mess. There are three points in time. Out of them one (the future) is entirely irrelevant and if you were to tear those pages out of the book (which I had wanted to do the 54th time Kal whined about his Ben'shmai being the bestest and strongest of women) nothing would change. The story would work anyway. Then the best one (the past) is fantastic but also easily skippable if you just don't care.
The one that does matter is the present with Gary Stu Tyler but that one is damn boring until the end.
Ah and the ending.
“The ending is paramount,” I always say.
And I do mean it. Even a mediocre series could be easily turned into a fantastic one by a good ending. Weirdly enough the start of Aurora's End was amazing and I had fun with it wanting to rate it 4/5 but everything else just dragged it down to a 1 or 2 out of 5.
The Ending was boring and predictable. Out of the main cast nobody felt any consequences for their utter stupidity. The ending even has them get money deposited in the past so they can be rich.
Did a rattlesnake write this?
Terrible series and a terrible end to it brought to a 2/5 by the virtue of it being readable (unlike Book 2).
