GOOD LORD. I will take the knowledge this series is over and I will never have to do this again to heart and I will sleep better at night. ( )

Excellent conclusion to a really good trilogy - suspenseful, twisty, and smart. I especially like the attention to and exploration of consent. Just one of the reasons I would consider this a feminist series. ( )

I love Sarah Rees Brennan's writing almost to a fault. I might be an anomaly among her fans because I never read any of her Harry Potter or other fan fiction - I just know her through her blog, which is awesome. Her short stories are absolutely fantastic, and the first book of the trilogy, The Demon's Lexicon, was nothing short of genius.

But then... The second book of the trilogy, The Demon's Covenant, was so-so and I still held out hope for a great finish since many awesome trilogies suffer from sagging middles.

But The Demon's Surrender simply does not deliver.

This is mainly due to one single giant mistake:

THE POV IS ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG ONE FOR THE STORY REES BRENNAN IS TRYING TO TELL.

When your POV character is reduced to hiding behind doors all the time evesdropping on other people's conversations and spying on other people's actions instead of doing her own stuff and focusing on her own story? Classic indicator of wrong POV choice.

This is why I was suspicious of the wisdom of a book written from Sin's perspective... and my suspicions turned out to be disappointingly right. These books are the story of the Ryves brothers primarily, and Mae and Jamie secondarily. Where did SIN come from?! She's a likeable character, sure, even an interesting character, but these books aren't about her. She's too far removed from the "core four", her life too separate from theirs, to be an effective POV choice in telling what is essentially THEIR story. There was simply no reason to pick her as our anchor point.

The POV character choice becomes the root cause of major problems with the book, such as -

* The plot is unforgiveably haphazard, to the extent that I have no idea what the "main" plot thread was supposed to be. Is it Sin's struggle to become the Goblin Market leader? Is it the hunt for the black pearl? Is it the Alan-Sin romance, on which the most page-time is spent?? Note how NONE of these main three plot threads have anything to do with Nick or Jamie at all, Mae's involvement is completely off-screen, and Alan's is purely romantic - i.e. completely unrelated to PLOT.

* There weren't any meaningful resolutions to the problems raised in the first two books. Nick finally expressing feelings for his brother falls flat and lacks emotional resonance, because it's all just being overheard by an unconnected party who is a stranger to Nick and doesn't recognise its significance. The whole Nick-Mae romance is shown through the cunning use of repeated evesdropping (UGH), so we miss out on emotional resonance (again, since Sin is a stranger to both people), completeness (since we can't have a random stranger following this new couple around too muhc), and even coherence (Nick apologising to Mae makes little sense when we don't know WHY or HOW he understood he was wrong).


But even apart from POV issues there was a lot of plain old clumsy writing.

* the issue of Goblin Market leadership was utterly undeveloped on the page. We see a lot of grandstanding about how each of the girls want the position, but we only hear second-hand off-screen mentions of exciting test tasks the girls were asked to do, and neither girl is ever seen first-hand doing anything concrete on the page to win the leadership. As a result, the resolution comes out of nowhere - we never see HOW or WHY the girls agreed to the solution, and it seems to have no connection to anything that happened in the book. What was the point??

* the plot thread involving the black pearl devolves into less than nothing. We see neither of the girls do anything at all to actually seek it out (the ONE questing expedition Sin goes on is sidetracked by a romance interlude with Alan), and later it simply goes missing. Turns out in the end that one of the good guys had it all along... but nobody uses it even though it could have saved lives, possibly even saved Alan from the demon possessing him! Why introduce such a (supposedly) powerful artefact in your book if you plan to do exactly nothing with it?

* the issue of Goblin Market inclusiveness suffers from the opposite problem: a great resolution with NO setup. We were never told that the Goblin Market was too cliqueish and xenophobic before! We didn't know the Market had a problem with inclusiveness and political correctness. (Weren't we told the problem was that it was too mercenary and capitalistic?) But suddenly Mae is solving problems nobody even knew they had, and it was quite confusing.


I did like some things: notably the handling/resolution of the secondary demons, the fate of the magicians, and Jamie's story (which came off surprisingly well considering he was hardly ever on the page... for once, seeing an old character from a complete stranger's POV actually worked in the book's favor because Jamie undergoes quite a profound transformation in this book).

But all in all this was quite a disappointing read. I still heartily recommend the first book in this trilogy. It works well as a standalone and it is a truly well-written, tightly plotted, polished piece of work. It is on the strength and promise in The Demon's Lexicon that I'm honestly looking forward to Rees Brennan's next book, Whisper.

( )

[b:The Demon's Lexicon|1829655|The Demon's Lexicon (The Demon's Lexicon Trilogy, #1)|Sarah Rees Brennan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348056121s/1829655.jpg|1829467] introduced us to Alan and Nick Ryves, brothers who had been on the run from power-hungry magicians all their lives. [b:The Demon's Covenant|6594657|The Demon's Covenant (The Demon's Lexicon, #2)|Sarah Rees Brennan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327882253s/6594657.jpg|6788394] brought their friends Mae and Jamie to the fore, one of whom was tempted by magic, the other by the Goblin Market. And in [b:The Demon's Surrender|9666870|The Demon's Surrender (Demon's Lexicon Trilogy #3)|Sarah Rees Brennan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1294614773s/9666870.jpg|14156711], the best dancer of the Goblin Market, Sin Davies, takes center stage. Despite numerous truces, victories, set-backs, and maneuvers, the war between ordinary humans, magicians, and demons has never ended. But in this book, a wobbly resolution is achieved between them.

This book is, as all of Brennan's Demon books have been, exceedingly clever and twisty. My one problem with it is that although I like all the characters, I don't buy any of the romances--especially not Sin and Alan's. I can see what they like in each other, but it seems like their romance developed very quickly, despite taking up a large part of this book. I really enjoyed this book, but I think less time spent on the ever-shifting love quadrangles between Alan&Mae&Nick&Sin and more time on plot would have made it even better. ( )

Review for entire trilogy.

This trilogy occupies the same emotional niche of "Supernatural" and Rob Thurman's Cal Leandros series : Brothers against the supernatural / demonic world, and one of the brothers has some kind of tie to the supernatural, which sets up shifting loyalties, possibilities of betrayal, and lots of angst and man-pain.

"Supernatural" is TV horror, mostly, with some comedy, and the Thurman series and Brennan's trilogy mine the same vein of dark fantasy/horror, with a lot of sarcastic quippy dialog. Brennan takes her books into a more YA direction, and while I liked it in the first book, I wasn't as happy in the second and third books. There is a perspective shift -- the first book is primarily told from the perspective of the younger of the two brothers, 16 year old Nick, and the big reveal about his identity is the overarching mystery of the book and sets up the larger question explored by the trilogy.

The second two books switch voices, each focusing on a different young woman who has potential romantic ties to the brothers, and her own crises to deal with. Unfortunately, Brennan's central crisis for the male characters was fundamental -- family, identity -- while her central crisis for the female character in the second book primarily centered around romantic dithering. That's annoying. There was a lot of plot that the second book could have focused on, yet an inordinate amount of the emotional weight was focused on which boy to kiss. I might have been more invested in that book if there had been less teenage romantic angsting. Book 3 was not as annoying, but it was a little too convenient -- a character is suddenly in love with a character for whom she had previously felt mostly contempt. So, not happy about the YA romancification of the girls' stories, but that's probably my only major complaint.

Good points: The world is interesting, and involves serious questions of ethics -- exploitation, choice and moral agency, violence. The dialog and writing are generally good. The characterization is also pretty good. And the overall arc of the characters was, I thought, satisfying.

Overall, the trilogy is definitely worth reading. ( )