My first go-round with finishing up this series was a mad-dash reading on a vacation in the summer. This go-round was also a mad dash in the summer, minus the vacation.
Fate of the Tearling picks up after the second book with our protagonist in chains and things seeming basically as bad as they can before they get worse.
Go read the first review if you want those thoughts and no spoilers (well, until you get to the part flagged for spoilers), but this one is basically a giant spoiler.
I want to talk about two things: 1) how brutal this series can be without dwelling on it, and 2) the ending.
On some level, you can argue that the ending negates some of the brutality, but I think it was partly how the ending gets justified.
But there's a very kind of casual violence that ramps up as the series goes along.
In the first book, there's violence, but it's usually away from the story you're reading. You know it's there, but you're not seeing it. Some of it picks up a bit more as that book went, but it never felt brutal.
The second book starts to throw in some more brutality. Though usually even then it was something that happened away from the POV characters.
The third book throws it in more liberally. Partly it's because of a certain character's death near the end. In another author's hands, that death would have been a heroic sequence. But because they're trying to show the futility of it all to some extent, it was just something very casually done. It reminded me of Finnick's death in the last Hunger Games book. Just another piece of trauma dropped in.
There were other similar deaths, but that one stung a bit more in its callousness.
And that gets us to the ending. How is the main character going to save the day after such an insurmountable situation? Basically hitting the reset button in what was again very casually brutal.
In this case, both times I read it, I thought it was a hallucination of the POV character at that point. And instead it was an incredibly ballsy choice for what is basically a YA book.
There's a part of me that feels like the ending was lazy. And there's a part of me that appreciates it because other series would have just saved the day and ignored that giant swaths of the working population just died, and a whole bunch of people are probably about to starve even if the day was technically saved.
There's a prequel to the series that I'll probably never read, especially considering the ending. And the ending means the series is very unlikely to continue. But this is a 5-star series, and I hope one day it gets a shitty streaming service adaptation.
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