Pain

I'll be honest, I'm giving this 5 stars because I loved the series, loved the characters, loved the relationships, and loved how things ended up.

That said, there were some flaws.

I felt like the resolution of the Staviti situation was a little bit hand-wavy and anticlimactic.

We've been hearing all series about how horrifying a god-war is, but we never got to see a god throwdown, dammit! Also, we poured a lot of energy and worry into the thought that one or more of the gods would be spying for Staviti and would double-cross them, but it never happened. Crowe doesn't count - he was NEVER on their side. He'd been arming their enemies with blades or chains from the outset.

Furthermore, I really wanted to see Crowe torn to pieces. Fuck that guy, seriously.

I also felt like there were lots of open questions that I wanted to understand. IS Topia Fate? Things in Willa's life - and the Abcurses' life - seemed to bend perfectly to put them where they needed to be. And the denizens of Topia seemed to be working to put the threads in place. Like giving Willa the chains in the last book - I feel positive that that was because the panteras knew she needed to be pulled into the imprisonment realm to meet Jakan. Several times, too, the panteras said they were forbidden from saying something. Forbidden by who? Topia? Is the world that sentient? Also, why was the Cup of Staviti such a big deal (the one that she stole in book 1)? Why was Sienna killed for it being in her vault? What was a big enough deal to turn Crowe against her when they'd been close for centuries? But mostly, given how the cup seems super replaceable - at one point an Abcurse literally said Staviti could make a hundred replacements in a day, or something like that - why did it matter at all?

And while I like where everything ended, and felt like the characters deserved that ending, it also felt a little overly perfect without any real coin to pay to get there.

I was waiting for dickbags like Dru or Karyn to try and attack them when they got to Blesswood. I honestly expected someone would die ... but no one did, and even characters we thought were dead were brought back, and they were perfect (without a lot of explanation as to how... I mean, Pica was nuts and evil, with her will-stealing Crowe blade, and I don't understand how that all went away and she was made pure. Our choices matter, right? Even if we regret them, we DID them. So how did she get a blank slate?). There was also no payoff to Rau saying this wasn't over, or the thread we were given in that encounter about only part of his soul being there. And again, the "fight" with Staviti wasn't a fight at all. The conflict between him and Cyrus at the end of book 4 was the biggest we get between gods in the whole series, and that was over in a flash (with very little of our attention on it, because we were with Willa and Emmy in the narration). And lastly, we never get to see the Abcurses throw down and be protectors. That was disappointing to me. We're told they are stronger than the Original Gods, because they were born as gods and not created. But we never see them in a god-war, they're never put in a position to fight. All the conflict is handled by Willa alone. And don't get me wrong, I love that she's a badass. But I'd like to see them contribute too ... otherwise their protectiveness just feels like posturing.

But I'm making it sound like I didn't like the book. In the end, these are just nitpicks. I loved it, because the core was always the characters and their relationships. I just feel like, in a series this ambitious, with a war between gods, the climax should have had more punch.