Hello everyone!
I am back with another book review, Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff.
I won't get too far into the synopsis because this is the final book in a series and I don't want to completely spoil everything that happened in those books. We get a new couple to follow in this book, as well as the original couples for the other books. Asha Grant is Kady's cousin and is stranded on Kerenza with her old flame-turned BT officer, Rhys Lindstrom. As time runs out for everyone, the group has to make some hard choices about who and what is worth fighting for.
I don't really want to talk too much about the actual plot of this book because of spoilers so I will talk about the book as a whole in more general terms. In comparison with the other books in this series, we saw some new elements. There were some comic/graphic novel time pages that were more visually based instead of text, done by Marie Lu. I don't remember there being any of this in the other books, if there was, it's been a while since I read them, so forgive me. There was also a lot more of the video transcriptions where we got larger chunks of more traditional prose text. This was helpful in making sure all the details came across clearly but I found that the longer pages of solid text were a bit more tedious compared to reading some of the other pages that had a handful of sentences more visually placed. That being said, I do think that overall, there is a good balance between visual and textual pages throughout the book as a whole.
I liked the new characters well enough but I didn't really feel like I got to know them that much throughout the course of the novel. They are old flames and had known each other before the book starts, so sometimes it felt a bit like there was unspoken history that the reader never got to fully experience. I also felt like as individual characters, I didn't really know much about them, other than a few cursory details. I wish there was a bit more development with them, but I also feel like the book had other things going on that I was more interested in.
For the first 300 pages or so, so the first half of the book, I had a hard time keeping track of all the characters, who was with who, who knew which people were still alive, etc. This felt a bit disjointed and most of the time I was trying to remember who someone was talking to and what they knew about the other storyline. I know this is a commonly used technique, two divided stories that are happening simultaneously and jumping back and forth, but I think there was just so much going on that I had a hard time figuring it all out.
Now, don't get me wrong - this was still a good book and a good end to the series, despite the problems I had with it. I think if you are more invested in the story and are paying REAL close attention to what is going on, you'll be able to grasp the story better than I did.
Overall, not as good as book two, but still a good conclusion.
I don't really want to talk too much about the actual plot of this book because of spoilers so I will talk about the book as a whole in more general terms. In comparison with the other books in this series, we saw some new elements. There were some comic/graphic novel time pages that were more visually based instead of text, done by Marie Lu. I don't remember there being any of this in the other books, if there was, it's been a while since I read them, so forgive me. There was also a lot more of the video transcriptions where we got larger chunks of more traditional prose text. This was helpful in making sure all the details came across clearly but I found that the longer pages of solid text were a bit more tedious compared to reading some of the other pages that had a handful of sentences more visually placed. That being said, I do think that overall, there is a good balance between visual and textual pages throughout the book as a whole.
I liked the new characters well enough but I didn't really feel like I got to know them that much throughout the course of the novel. They are old flames and had known each other before the book starts, so sometimes it felt a bit like there was unspoken history that the reader never got to fully experience. I also felt like as individual characters, I didn't really know much about them, other than a few cursory details. I wish there was a bit more development with them, but I also feel like the book had other things going on that I was more interested in.
For the first 300 pages or so, so the first half of the book, I had a hard time keeping track of all the characters, who was with who, who knew which people were still alive, etc. This felt a bit disjointed and most of the time I was trying to remember who someone was talking to and what they knew about the other storyline. I know this is a commonly used technique, two divided stories that are happening simultaneously and jumping back and forth, but I think there was just so much going on that I had a hard time figuring it all out.
Now, don't get me wrong - this was still a good book and a good end to the series, despite the problems I had with it. I think if you are more invested in the story and are paying REAL close attention to what is going on, you'll be able to grasp the story better than I did.
Overall, not as good as book two, but still a good conclusion.