The Final Gambit by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
To start I want to say that as a whole I really enjoyed this book. If you read and enjoyed the first two, then I can confidently say that this book will provide you with a satisfying ending to the trilogy. I recommend it. But I recommend it with the caveat that the journey to that satisfying ending is a little frustrating.
My favorite parts of these books are the scavenger hunt/mystery and the characters. This book delivered a great scavenger hunt, with stakes that were fitting for a finale. The character writing left a lot to be desired though.
[VERY MILD SPOILERS FROM HERE ON]
Like many other readers, Grayson was my favorite character in these books. If I had to pick a favorite book out of the three, it would be "The Hawthorne Legacy" just because he got more time to shine with the cast. Grayson continued to be a prominent character in this last book, but god was he frustrating. It felt like his entire character was relegated to the #broken edgy loner. Maybe that was appropriate for his arc, because he did have a lot of unresolved trauma to work through. But I can't make those same concessions for Jameson.
Jameson was a possessive, insecure, melodramatic jerk for a lot of this book. Scenes focused on the series's central love triangle were fairly sparse, but they were a slog whenever they did come up, because the conflict felt like it was rolling in circles every time it was discussed. By the end of the second book, Avery and Jameson had committed themselves to a very clear relationship, so I don't know why we had to keep teasing a Grayson/Avery relationship that was never going to happen. The characters knew it wasn't going to happen, and the readers knew it wasn't going to happen, so it felt like a waste to spend so much of the story fighting about it anyways. I'm not a fan of love triangles, if that wasn't obvious.
I want to say again that this book provided a great ending to a series that I enjoy. I think that "The Inheritance Games" is a great series, especially for a younger teen audience. It has likable characters, fun settings, and complex scavenger hunts that are a joy to try and solve alongside the characters. All that being said, the love triangle and some frustrating character decisions made the book occasionally annoying to read.
I gave the first two books in this series four stars because I thought that they were an easy, fun read that didn't resonate with me deeply enough to earn a full five stars. This is a comfort series with great mysteries, but the themes tend to be a little plain. This third and final book only gets three stars from me because the character writing was just so frustrating at so many points. The ending was great and I'm very, very happy with it, but I don't think that it would be fair to bump this book's score up just for an especially good 20 pages at the end.
I recommend this book to fans of the first two because it closes the series off well and it has a great scavenger hunt along the way. But the deliberate breaking of characters just for the sake of drama was really frustrating to me, especially because the character most impacted was one of my favorites. After this book, I'm a Xander stan all the way - at least he stayed the same fun-loving dork that he was for the last two books.
TL;DR Don't let the 3-star rating put you off. This is a good finale to the series; I just didn't enjoy it as much as the previous two because of some character writing and decisions that were made for the sake of a love triangle that was frankly already resolved by the end of the second book.
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