First two books are excellent, but the third book lost the plot by the end. SMALL SPOILER ALERT!!! Saying the sisters second origin makes her overly rational and intelligent, but proceed to write the exact opposite is mind numbing. She wants to make brother happy, but thinks he’ll be OK with her killing his friends. That is idioticy at its finest. Turning her into a big bad when you already have the king, the duke, seven, Zeref, Sylvester and shapeshifter, Arbor’s barrens, whoever runs the slave trade, the criminal boss lady, and Ramson is completely unnecessary. I was waiting for her to have an arc overcoming and controlling the second core. We already had a training arc of her learning how to control her chaotic magic flow.
I’m ok with MCs making mistakes even if they are stupid mistakes. No one is perfect, but the sequence of knowledge he goes through about the origin is terrible. He finds out he has it and its power is destruction; he learns how to slightly control this power through his glaive; he finds out there are two sides to the origin because it tells him it is creation and destruction; the origin gives him knowledge through magic on how to use bothsides; he can’t control either side of the origin even though he used it before and was given knowledge; Finally, he says to Gold that the origin has 2 sides, but he doesn’t know what they are… you read that right. By the end of the third book the MC doesn’t know what his power is when he already learned what it was and has used it. His progression is going backwards. I think Arbor is a good MC, but his power progression is written badly in the third book.
Now I got that off my chest, there are really cool things in this story, and it is all the side characters. The biggest bright spot out of the bunch is the Seven and Ram…son story. Ramson’s karma is relentless and Seven’s sanity is scarily dynamic. It’s soooo good. I wish the Arbor seven meet up happened, but it has the potential to be one of best scenes in the entire story.
Last but not least, the narration is absolute perfection. Soundbooth Theater nails it. I love all the voice actors involved. If you see any audio books with Soundbooth Theater, you are in for a treat.