The Blurb:
The Time for the final battle has come. Edmund’s armies have surrounded the Rioseco Abbey, trapping the few survivors inside. The sight that Ilyan was given a thousand years ago is about to come to pass. If only Joclyn was able to fight. Joclyn is tormented by the hallucinations that Cail’s mind has left her with, her magic an uncontrollable torrent that even Ilyan cannot control. Her moments of lucidity are broken by fears of dripping pipes and bleeding walls, and a desire to kill Ryland that she is having trouble trying to ignore. The sight has shown her power, shown her success, but it has also shown her death – The end of her life something she is not quite willing to give up on yet. Even past her death, the sight has shown her love, and that love may be the only key to her sanity, to her strength, and to Edmund’s death. That love may stand in her way, and a single choice may tip the scales and secure their future, or destroy their fate.

My thoughts:

I really enjoy this series, and I’m happy that by the end of this book, Jocelyn is a little less broken. Don’t get me wrong, after everything she’s been through trauma is super realistic. It’s just really hard to read someone that needy. Honestly, the further I get into this series, the less I identify with any of the characters. I suppose that’s to be expected because the extreme stuff they’ve been through, coupled with out of this world supernatural content but this book series became more high-fantasyish as it progressed. Some readers will love that. Me, I prefer urban. And while this is set in our world, it’s lost the our-world feel. They’re stuck in an abbey in the middle of nowhere in the book, not a single character within said abbey is human nor is anyone they care about outside of the abbey, there are long chunks of dialogue in another language (a real, spoken language mind you, but one about as familiar to me as elvish), celebrating customs I’m not familiar with and arguing about traditions I’ve never heard of. Jocelyn should be my entry into this world because she’s as unfamiliar with all of it as I am, but she doesn’t help explain, she vacillates between irrationally angry, incredibly panicked, confused, then intuitively all knowing. I don’t get the rules of this world, and that probably has a lot to do with the amount of time between me consuming the books before this in like a day months and months ago and reading this one. Also, I’m team Ryland, so between those three factors, I found myself skimming a lot of this book.
However I will still read the next one. The setting is changing and Jocelyn is stronger. I need to know how this series ends. I’m invested.