First and foremost, I refuse to accept that this is the end of the series. As an end to the arc, it’s perfectly servicable and plenty interesting. As the end of the books all together, no.
This time, Harper ends up going to Portugal to deal with Purlis and one of Carlos’ old enemies. The whole story revolved largely around Carlos instead of either Harper or Quinton, getting into how he became a vampire in the first place and taking a look at his sordid past while trying to stop the bone mages from bringing forth a dragon that would destabalize Europe.
I’m against it as an end to the series mostly because it revolves around a secondary character rather than our lead. I still have plenty of questions about Quinton and Harper to be answered,1 and instead the book goes off about the vampire who was the crutch for the first bit of the series. While it was nice to have some more Carlos and get a bit more information on him, as the final book in a series is not where I’d want it.
I could probably also do without any more Carlos/Harper moments ever. The dialogue between the two felt very off somehow and this whole Carlos thinking Harper is the best thing ever that he would also like to have sex with turned out to be really awkward more than anything else. I don’t know what to make of it, but I felt like it probably could have been cut.
Quinton, on the other hand, only brought up friendship once! It was awful and then the issue finally dropped. At last. I hope that when the series continues,2 that never comes up again. Ever. It’s my least liked subplot in anything I’ve read recently and I really didn’t want it handled so directly in a book about adults. None of these sounded like conversations I’ve had with other people. No more of them.
I was actually really surprised that so little of the book ended up being about Quinton or Purlis. It might have been his organization, but for all he was built up, Purlis didn’t actually do much in the book. He delegated the torture to someone else. He might have caught Harper initially, but she kept getting passed off to the bone mages. He kind of reacted to the soul link in that he felt it now and then when Harper got injured, but so little was about Quinton and Purlis that I was kind of disappointed when he was taken care of at the end.
Speaking of, I can’t wait for Quinton and Harper to finally be married because it means that everyone stops saying spouse-in-soul or coming up with other married-not-married terms for them. When they elope3 then we can get back to everything back to being about Harper nearly getting killed and saving her damsel of a husband.4
I think that’s most of why I’m a bit unsatisfied at this point. I thought that this was the end of the series, but there’s so much left unresolved. The epilogue consisted of a lot of telling about what happened to the smattering of characters, left out a bunch of other characters, and we get the answer to a marriage proposal. I don’t even get a dose of ferret in the book when Chaos5 has appeared in literally every other one. I don’t know what happens to her.
Still, there were good parts too. I did like meeting Quinton’s sister and her kids. And it was nice to see the Danzingers again one last time, even if we only get to see them the once. Mara even got to do something and give us a nice reminder of how far Harper has come. The magic, again, was nicely done6 and it didn’t wait until the half way point to pick up the pace. When things were moving, they were fantastic and there were a lot of little subplots and research that were interesting.
It’s just not a final book. Labyrinth was a final book. It was about Harper, about being a Greywalker and about what her role was in the story. This was the end of a story arc where Carlos stepped in and helped save the day again with a “Stay Tuned for More Adventures!” at the end.
I’m going to hold out hope for a new book and a new arc one of these days. I liked the series and I want a proper conclusion to it eventually. I’m just going to have to think of Revenant as a book that ended on a “To be continued…” for now and hope that eventually there is more.
[AMAZONPRODUCTS asin=”B00G3L6LY4″]- And a desire to have Harper dance as a plot point because for how often I’m told about it, I’m almost never shown [↩]
- And for all my complaining, I do hope it does [↩]
- You know that’s how it will go down [↩]
- Who still needs to get beat up so bad that Harper comes to his rescue. Why has this not happened yet? [↩]
- The ferret [↩]
- Even if that bone swapping was very convenient [↩]