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LP

Still in pain

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2016

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-SPOILERS-
Finished the 3rd book 2 days ago but the feeling of being betrayed does not disappear. A deep wound in the back. Kelsea we love and know would never go back in time to kill the most miserable kid in the whole Tear world. Finn was not the devil in this - William Tear was. He ignored his child and hid his identity, he betrayed Row and did nothing to repair the situation which created this miserable and unhappy child and eventually brought a disaster to Tearland. Lilly and Jonathan knew and did nothing either and that makes them as guilty as William Tear. If there was anywhere to go in the past, Kelsea would chose to make sure Row was happy and loved. I am still under impression that Kelsea grew so much more mature and smarter than the author herself, that Johansen simply did not know what to do with this. We can deal with the fact that the magic of the crown is not clear at all, we can deal with the impression that after their deaths Brenna and the Red Queen never existed, we can deal with a lot of little things left unexplained. But Erica, how, how could you think killing young Row would solve the whole Kingdom issues and create this wonderful world??? To me, it's like "Oh, the world is ugly, let's kill this sick person and it will all be beautiful again".

NeonElephant

A disappointment

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2016

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I'm unsure if I can adequately express how much I loved the first two books in this series. Not only were they creative and exciting, but they were also unique and well written. The first two books were so completely amazing that the idea of waiting over a year for the final installment in the series was both agonizing and unbearable. That being said, this book was a complete and utter disappointment.

Not only did we have new characters added to the story, but several characters from the first two books were completely abandoned and their stories were unfinished and incomplete. And even though abandoning those characters completely blows, some transformed into drastically different people that were in no way familiar to the ones we had seen from the first two books.

If that wasn’t enough, the book was also extremely long and drawn out. Not only were the first 250 pages unnecessary, but the ending came completely out of left field and felt rushed and unrealistic.

I could go on and list the rest of my grievances, but what would be the point? The book has already been published and I don’t have a magical crown that will allow me to travel back in time and fix it.

Carolyn Vermette

Don't bother reading it.

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2016

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I am beyond disappointed in this book. Spoilers ahead.

Vampire children? Really? There was no hint of this in any past books. It is cinematically entertaining, but offers no help in furthering the plot or adding to the story that was already well done. We had a great villain--Row Finn was terrifying and complex. This was a cheap addition.

Her mom is alive. After nearly three whole books, Kelsea just runs into her "dead" mom. Once again, zero foreshadowing of this. I could forgive it, I really could, if it added anything to the story. It doesn't. At all. It was random, rushed, ill thought out, and stupid.

Kelsea travels back in time and pops out of Katie's mouth. Weird. Once again, written in a cinematic quality that makes me think Johansen was catering to Hollywood, not her readers.

A magical time traveling crown that allows for a deus ex machina ending. We knew the crown was important, but it's an almost all-powerful device that allows her to change the present to make the last two books null and void. Not to mention, this time traveling thing was not brought up until almost the very ending of the third book in a trilogy. Was this planned? If so, why are the blurbs for each chapter set in a future time when Queen Kelsea had made the Tearling a better and more prosperous place? For instance, Glee shows her granddaughter a statue of the Queen and praises her. So this was never meant to happen? That's bull.

Maybe Johansen was rushed to meet a deadline, but the overall feel of the book honestly makes me think she had no idea where this story was meant to go. This book was terrible.

Top reviews from other countries

Tales of a Librarian

Disapointing and messy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2017

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Ok having had time to really process my reactions to this book here goes nothing.

Firstly it's probably telling in terms of a writer meeting my expectations as a reader that I have decresed my rating by one star for each book in this series.

Queen of the Tearling was not flawless but Johansen's writing style and good all round sword and sorcery adventure covered a lot of sins so 5 stars.

Invasion of the Tearling was a good book. Not great because the author had primed us to expect one genre with hints of another and instead delivered us the previously hinted at genre with hints of the former. It really felt like she had changed her mind about what direction she wanted the trilogy to go in having painted herself into a corner with the first book. The big no no in book two though was that Kelsea wasn't Kelsea for most of the book. I don't mean that the character changed with the story, I mean she was literally a different character - that business with Thorne was so out of left field it knocked me out of the plot. When authors do this either out of laziness or wishing they'd set things up differently this is cheating the reader. So four stars.

Fate of the Tearling? It was a mess.

I still really like Johansen's writing. I still love the characters and hurray we get the old Kelsea back here too. But otherwise the plot was all over the place and it felt as if the book had been rushed to the finish line without enough time or thought.

TBH if you're going to write a pre-destination time paradox or mess around with temporal mechanics there's a 90% chance you'll piss me off. Not because I'm an expert because I am emphatically not. But because it is so hard to get right.

SPOILERS!

I knew where it was heading. I knew Kelsea was going to have to fix things in the past. And I get why she picked that time - she needed to make sure that she existed on both time lines because otherwise she would never have discovered the power of the sapphires or how to enter Lily's memories or what the Crossing was. If she'd accidentally blotted herself out on one timeline then both would have ceased to exist and she'd be back to square one. And I get that in the theory of temporal mechanics, when something punches through the space-time continuum it alledgedly attempts to heal itself but leaves 'scar tissue' like Kelsea's double memories at the end of the book. But with all that it was so utterly anti climatic. A complete Deux ex machina that really made me feel quite resentful of the time I spent reading the books. We were primed to expect one type of book despite heavy foreshadowing on where the series was going and the author kept changing tracks. Playing with your readers' expectations is fine as long as it's done honestly. This felt like it wasn't.

Add to that one of my epic fantasy bugbears - building up second and third tier characters and doing nothing with them for entire books or at all.

Or having characters act out of character in order to force a plot in a certain direction. Also bad.

On top of that I was irritated with the idea that the problem could only be solved in the past. This is personal I know, but I would rather have seen Kelsea grow as a character and decide not to do a quick change in the past but instead steer a harder course into the future and make it better from there.

Katie's viewpoint and arc - not really feeling it. Lily's pov in book 2 was at least interesting as disjointed as it felt. Katie's just wasn't.

I've seen people complain about Penn and Kelsea's relationship ending but actually that made sense. Bit fed up with the idea that if a woman gets kidnapped or imprisoned all her man will do is get drunk and feel sorry for himself though.

The end was mega abrupt. There are authors who can slap you in the face with an ending and you'll thank them. Johansen isn't one of them. Also we already knew what was going to happen because she'd told us, so it wasn't a big reveal - we were there until the end because we wanted to see the journey. The journey did not pay off or frankly make much sense. Vampire children anyone? Or how about the Red Queen's ignomimious low key ending? It really needed more work.

Overall there was enough about this book, and this series, that I liked enough to feel incredibly frustrated with how it ended. Ultimately Johansen's superb writing kept me reading rather than the very wobbly plot. I'd try a future book by the author but I'm not sure I can even read book one of this series again which is a shame.

Anne

Frustrating and disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 26, 2017

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I enjoyed "Queen of the Tearling" which was the first book in this series although in many ways it was a rather predictable fantasy novel with a young woman coming into her powers and having to save her nation. I liked the minor characters particularly and thought that they were strong and that the author was obviously going to develop them further in succeeding books. Book two - "Invasion of the Tearling" was a bit of a surprise as the series veered towards science fiction with a connection through time. I thought it was unusual and actually better than the first. The third book, however, was a huge disappointment and the ending of the trilogy was very unsatisfying.

In this book the author has a past narrative again but also returns to Kelsea and her struggle with the Red Queen. The book attempts to tie together the past and present and characters we thought we knew are shown to be very different (although I liked the extra information we got about the Red Queen). Now, all we thought we were told at the beginning of the first book turns out to be untrue and Kelsea has to rethink her life and its meaning because of what she now knows.

Suddenly, in the final third of the book the author takes the story in a whole new direction, dumps a lot of information on us and then ends the story so abruptly that I wasn't at all sure what was going on. It was all very flat and the end sort of faded away rather than ended decisively. The minor characters who had been given stories and who we had invested time in just disappeared from the story and others such as the Fetch seemed to entirely change their character. I have to say that whatever the author intended what she created was a huge anticlimax which left me frustrated and unsatisfied.

A lot of what happened in this third book wasn't even hinted at in the first two volumes and it left me feeling confused. The trilogy as a whole has some good ideas in it but ultimately it fails because they are not brought together well and the ending is unsatisfactory. I liked the first two books and anticipated the third but I was very disappointed. I really can't recommend that anyone starts this trilogy because the ending makes the rest of the story rather pointless.

Becca

From clever beginnings to zombie children - a huge disappointment!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 19, 2017

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I loved the first two books in this trilogy. The first was an interesting departure from the usual fantasy and although Kelsea's character became much less likable in the second book, I enjoyed the introduction of Lily and thought it was an unusual and interesting twist to add the dystopian element at this stage. Unfortunately this book just completely disregards all the clever set up and history and gives a totally underwhelming ending.

The Red Queen, who was the main antagonist of the last two novels, is reduced to barely a footnote in this one! We get no further character development or more detail about her fascinating history. She just fizzles out.
Instead the focus switches to 'the dark thing', another character who was well written and scary but in this book just becomes ridiculous. I mean zombie children?! Could you get any more unoriginal/boring.

The ending is a total cop out, so unrewarding. I was upset, after all the excellent character development and minor characters that we'd come to love (Mace, Ewan, Andalie) they all just disappear.

Having said that the book is still an enjoyable read. The author is really great at making you want to keep reading and you feel really connected with the characters. It's just a shame there's no pay off and the reader is left shell shocked and disappointed. I understand that it's always difficult with time travel stories and they often don't make much sense. But I think the author needed to think this one out a bit better. The book does read a little like she's making it up as she goes along, shifting storylines and changing the focus of the trilogy. It will be difficult for me now to recommend this trilogy knowing how bad the ending is, which is a shame because the first two books really are brilliant.

S. M. Darling

Great story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2020

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Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Captivating, exciting, interesting. I couldn’t tell where the story would go but all the story lines were brilliant. The characters seemed that real and the scenes about that you could visualise them.

Heidi

A truly unique series

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2019

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I forgot just how great this series is! I can’t believe how long I left it to finish the trilogy. This definitely needs more hype, as it feels like a truly unique series which is rare!

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