THE RISING – Kelley Armstrong

Things are getting desperate for Maya and her friends. Hunted by the powerful St. Clouds and now a rival Cabal as well, they’re quickly running out of places to hide. And with the whole world thinking they died in a helicopter crash, it’s not like they can just go to the authorities for help.

Old secrets are revealed and unexpected characters make a surprising return in this stunning conclusion to Kelley Armstrong’s New York Times bestselling Darkness Rising trilogy. – Goodreads description

I loved the first book in this series. I really liked the second book. This one… was just okay. 

I think what I loved most about the early series was how easy it was to slip into the fictional world Armstrong created, and how much I could identify with the characters and feel the setting. The story moved along effortlessly and I didn’t get bored or lost. 

This book didn’t manage to continue that momentum. Some sections felt like info dumps, others like the author wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next and meandered a bit more than necessary. Mostly, though, the constant running that was entertaining for most of book two just made my feet hurt by the third. 

Some of the character shifts she attempts didn’t work very well for me either. The bad guys becoming sort of good guys was difficult for me to reconcile. Hayley suddenly being selfless was also a stretch. And while Ash’s downright surly attitude was consistent, it also kinda sucked. The guy just wouldn’t let anyone near him.

There were some plot points that didn’t work that well for me either. The justification given for not telling the parents that their kids were still alive didn’t really make sense. And the decision to negotiate rather than running, while it made sense, felt like a bit of a let down after nearly two solid books of running away. Couldn’t they have just figured this out somewhere in the middle of book two?

But the part that frustrated me most was the love triangle between Maya, Daniel and Rafe. One of the things I loved about the first book was that Daniel and Maya were allowed to simply have a close friendship, one that wasn’t made all messy by romantic drama. As someone who has always had a lot of guy friends, I appreciated this. And while Rafe’s character flip flopped a lot between sympathetic and too much of a bad boy, I thought there was the potential for he and Maya to make a go of it. So when this triangle developed I was really disappointed. It made me dislike Maya’s character and dislike the “new” couple – her and Daniel. 

On top of that, I cannot STAND when characters aren’t at all aware of their feelings. I had this same issue with Obsidian and Onyx (the first two books in the Lux series by Jennifer L. Armentrout). It’s one thing not to want to feel how you do. Fine, we’ve all been there. It’s another to apparently not have a single clue as to what your feelings are. Armstrong practically had to re-write Maya’s memories to make her relationship with Daniel seem feasible, and even then, it fell flat for me.

So yeah, not digging that.

I’m glad I finished this series, because I did want to know what happened. Unfortunately, I have to be honest and say that I was underwhelmed by the conclusion. I think more could have been done with this story, and I would have liked more long-term info – the way this ended sort of felt like it was setting up for a sequel ten years later. Sad I couldn’t love this more!

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