Non-spoiler summary: Chester is a moron and catalyzes every problem, but the power of friendship overcomes all. Repeat.
This series took a dive. Some climatic moments strung together with empty scenes. This result shouldn’t be too surprising as book 3 was similar, but the filler got way more obvious.
– There’s almost no character development. One thing happened. To head off the obvious critique: gaining power is not character development.
– The editing/prose got worse (stop using words multiple times in the same sentence!). Maybe it happened in previous books, but this one does a lot of Telling vs Showing.
– The purpose of dialogue was to teach the reader (lecture, yay) or to explain the obvious. This made the dialogue extremely boring.
These issues together made the book dull. Cool things occasionally happened, but they didn’t matter. I imagine the authors know where they want the story to end up, but have no idea how to get there. If they don’t care, then how could I?
Narrators are astounding as always. they were the reason I finished the book at all.