Son

This is not the series finale that I expected. On the one hand, it wrapped everything quite nicely. I enjoyed revisiting the first book from Claire's POV. I felt very sad for her, but at the same time I was excited to find out how she finds Gabe after they're gone. I expected to read about how the memories returned to the Community and what part it played in Claire's story. Apparently, none. Maybe explaining the memories conundrum would be too much, I understand the author making the choice to just extract Claire from the Community in such a way that the whole trauma of that makes her lose memory. All that was a bit underwhelming, but understandable. But the second part of the book...

Meeting yet another community that made part of this strange world was interesting. The people and their way of life made sense and seemed very life-like. The fact that Alys started taking Claire to visit patients with her just a few months after the latter arrived seemed a bit strange, but not too unrealistic. The old woman did get attached to Claire after all.
The romance between Claire and Einar was quite predictable, but I liked the way it was set up. Their whole story felt sad, but realistic. There was another thing about Einar that bugged me a lot. For the love of me, I don't understand why include “I cooked for him (father) like a wife and washed his clothes and was a wife in other ways too terrible to mention” in a book for teenagers! The things his father done to the boy were already awful. I hate this atrocity for the sake of atrocity. Plus this particular trauma should have messed the boy up way worse than he was.

The other thing that just drives me up the wall is how it took Claire SEVEN freaking years to finally have the bright idea to talk to Jonas. SE-VEN!!! I absolutely hate these fake “last moment” situations, when there is no real reason for things not to happen earlier. I kind of can understand that she didn't want Gabe to know her as an old person (but not really actually, it's stupid), but how in the world didn't she think of talking to Jonas before? At least to know more about Gabe's years that she missed.

I was promised that I'll need my tearducts for this book, so at the point when Claire told everything to Jonas and conveniently began dying, I was afraid that at least one of them dies in the process of killing the Trademaster. They didn't. It saved the book for me. It saved the whole series actually.

And yes, no crying this time. Too angry for that. And no one died anyway. All in all, it was a good ending of the series.