Hello everyone!
I am back with another book review, today it is Long Way Home by Katie McGarry.
This story, which I can only assume is the last in the series (mainly because there is a major conflict resolution that would make book four hard, but also because Goodreads doesn't have a fourth book listed), follows Violet and Chevy. Violet is the daughter of a Terror member who died a few years ago. She has little faith in the Terror's ability to protect her family and has tried to cut them out of her life, going so far as to dump her Terror boyfriend, Chevy. Chevy is about as close as you can get to being Terror, his grandfather Cyrus is the president and his uncle Eli is a core member. His father was part of the Terror but he died when Chevy was a baby, leaving him with so many questions and feeling stuck between the world of the Terror and that of normalcy.
Going on the premise that this is the final book in the series, I think McGarry did a really good job wrapping everything up and addressing many of the issues I had. As I mentioned earlier, the rules, especially those surrounding the women, of the Terror were beginning to rub me the wrong way. While the club claims to want to help Violet, they shut her out of every decision and force her to take things into her own hands. This irritated me and I was so glad that McGarry had Violet voice these concerns throughout the book. She was not just going to sit there and wait for a man to rescue her, she was going to save herself. She asked hard questions about the values of the club and why women aren't 'allowed' to do certain things within it. I really appreciated that someone was addressing these issues that I was having with the book.
I liked the relationship between Violet and Chevy, but they didn't seem to have as much chemistry as other couples. I'm not sure if it was because they were already together at one point so McGarry felt it wasn't as necessary to give a ton of background and buildup, or if it was because there were a million other things going on, but I just felt like the romance was more of a convenience than an integral part of the story. There was a little bit of a connection between the two, but from what I saw, most of it was leftover from their relationship that had ended earlier.
There were a couple of twists I wasn't expecting, mainly with Chevy's father, but I felt like one of them made sense and the other was just kind of randomly thrown in to keep the story going. I believed them, but I wasn't sure if they were particularly necessary to the story as a whole. Although, apparently part of this intertwines with the Pushing the Limits series, which I would have picked up on and enjoyed more if I had read that series.
Overall, I enjoyed this one, but not as much as the other books in the series.