What do you think?
Rate this book
563 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 20, 2006
And so they lived happily ever after... (What I wanted)
What I got: And so the world moved on... (Which was definitely crueler)
The story comes full circle in A Darkling Plain and if there's one thing I've come to learn about Philip Reeve it's that he takes you off-guard. He concluded each of his four books so satisfyingly I was almost tempted to heave a contented sigh after I finished them. The plot of this book runs wild in 200 different directions but you know it's all going to converge on a single point, it does and quite beautifully at that.
Let me talk first about the most savage thing known to mankind: epilogues. Not all of them are moving but the ones that are tend to go there ALL the way, ya know? I can count on my fingers the number of epilogues that made my eyes water. This particular one wasn't tearful but heartbreaking and brutal all the same. I cannot think of a better way it all could have ended. With the writer's tenacity to be mellow and funny at one time and pitiless and severe at the next, this was apt.
I'm happy for Tom and Hester. Hester finally got the love or the "show" of love, she truly deserved. Pennyroyal did not deserve to be saved again and again and that is the only thing that made me angry. Anna, Shrike, London, all the old characters came back and the story came full circle. (My ebook version must have been faulty or something because it says Grike throughout the book) I was also saddened by the fact that Hester and Wren never met again. That was distressing, Wren never forgiving her mother when she was alive.
Surprise and trauma, these are the two things this book operated on.
“That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.”