The final entry in the Healing Wars series, honestly at the rate I've been reading the books I didn't think I would be able to find a copy of this until next year, and then the first week back at school I saw a copy in the school library and oh-so-causally snatched it up to check out. Not much else I can say to introduce the book so let's see if this series ends well or if it falls and burns.
Darkfall by Janice Hardy
Summary: It's time and past for Nya and her friends to return to Geveg where a rebellion is once again underway and to try to find her sister. Armed with more knowledge of past and too much experience with fighting Nya is willing to help make a final, desperate push against the Duke to help free all three of the kingdoms from his maniacal schemes.
The Good: Well I won't keep people in suspense, yes I think this was a pretty good end to the series. It takes the concept of "healers as fighters/generally dangerous people" a bit farther still and managed to keep a large part of it's cast from the first two books still involved. One thing I did like, and I think it's not too spoilery to mention, is how even by the end Nya is not the overall leader of this growing revolution, recognizes that she wouldn't be a great leader, and doesn't really want to be one either. The epilogue hints that she will become a leader later in life but considering how young she is (no more than 16 by the end of all of this) I'm really glad Hardy chose not to go that route and it felt much more true to Nya's character this way.
The Bad: The book unsurprisingly is not perfect however; there are some character deaths which felt completely out of left field to me and one character ended up feeling a lot like a expy of River from Firefly by the end*. The epilogue felt a little too neat to me but that's more personal preference than an actual failing of the story (especially since you could cut it out and it wouldn't affect the story at all). Nothing too unexpected happened, aside from all of those deaths everything had been well-foreshadowed I thought although some people might disagree with me about the climax (which kind of involved a deus ex machina but honestly it didn't really feel like one to me, more like the characters just got ridiculously lucky which is a bit different).
Overall I was quite happy with how this story ended and rather happy with the series as a whole. As a whole I would give the series four out of five stars and plan to buy copies for myself someday. Darkfall came out in 2011 and I'm not certain if it would have made my top books for the year list (simply since I can't remember what else I read that year off the top of my head) but i thin it would have been a strong contender for my favorite five books of the year.
*and after typing that I now wonder if the author is a Joss Whedon fan....
Similarly to Star Crossed/Liar's Moon, I first read The Shifter a year or two back and hadn't gotten a chance to read the sequel since I was busy and hadn't seen it at the library. I did this summer so, again like SC, I checked out Shifter first, speed-read through it to make sure I remembered all the characters and then about a week later went into Blue Fire. Perhaps I'm a bit odd that when reading books in a series I actually don't like to read them back to back, I like to have a bit of space between them partially so I can keep them more seperate in my mind. However, when I got back to school in late August I found that the school library had the last book in the series, Darkfall, and, considering that it was on display just waiting for me to walk by, I've already read and finished that one as well. So this review is going to be a little shorter, it's going to be a while before I get to Darkfall and I've been able to keep them fairly separate in my mind but it's a bit harder to talk about the merits of an individual book when I already know how the entire story is going to end.
Blue Fire by Janice Hardy
Summary: The Isles of Geveg might have escaped one disaster when Nya accidentally killed the Luminary of the Healing Academy (and in the process saved all of the young healers of Greg from his warped experiments) but war still looms large on the horizon as the Duke of Baseeri seeks to bring the islands and the other lands he captured decades ago under tighter control. Nya herself is now in danger as her mysterious Shifter powers have become well-known and there is a bounty on her head. Thus she finds herself on the way to the capital of Baseeri where new, even more terrible things are being planned and if she wants to save her friends she'll have to stop these plans and save everyone.
The Good: Despite the change in location a good chunk of the cast comes along and I really liked that, the bonds Nya had between her friends at the end of the first book was something I liked (especially since most protagonists tend to have only one or two close friends and they are always the opposite sex, more large groups of mixed-genders please!). Some more of Nya's own past is revealed in this book (something I wasn't expecting at all even though, in retrospect, not much was said in the first book) which combined with a few other things helped flesh out the overall conflict (the Duke vs everyone else) a little more and made the conflict less black and white. The idea of healers and healing being something that can be abused was even more explored in this story and by now I can never look at that trope again in the same way. In anime there's always a big hubaloo when a series (at least seems to) deconstruct a widely used trope so the trope is never used the same way again and this has been a huge deconstruction of everything that people normally associate with healers, I'm going to be so disappointed when I go back to stories that aren't nearly this creative.
The Bad: I'm still not entirely sure of the motivation for anything the Duke did but, given how many people in real life have conquered other nations because they can/ they're "supposed" to be the rightful rulers and people are forever developing new weapons for these causes so I can't call it unrealistic either. Speaking of weapons, to be as vague as possible, that big weapon I thought was one of the weakest points of the book and still feels like a weird, reverse-deus-ex-machina (diabolus-ex-machina?) and I just didn't like it. Thankfully it's not a major part of the story, it does it's job and then gets out of the way, but it still felt rather awkward to me.
So yes, I'm still really enjoying this series, although it'll probably be a while before I get around to Darkfall (ie, probably November), and I plan on buying the whole set someday when I actually have the money for it.
