Blackout

I ended up liking Blackout, the third and final book in Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy, much better than Deadline. But still not as much as Feed. I think this is going to end up being one of those trilogies where I just ignore the existence of the second and third books. Like His Dark Materials.

I am so glad George was back for this book. I actually considered skipping all of Shaun's chapters and just reading George's. But I decided I'd probably miss too much of the story that way.
George is ultimately what kept me going through this trilogy. The science is unbelievable to a point that I ended up writing it off as magic so I could accept the story on its own merits. I mean, clones of dead people being nearly exact matches of the people they're cloned from? Memories and everything? Also sexually transmitted immunities? (That is what Grant was getting at with Shaun, right?)

Anyway, Grant did a decent job expanding the conspiracy beyond the first book to take up a whole trilogy. Even though I didn't feel surprised by anything revealed in the bad guy monologue at the end of the book, it was definitely more than I would have guessed from the first book. And the action was still really exciting, especially when George and Shaun finally meet about halfway through the book.

I don't know, though. I'm ultimately disappointed because the first book was just so good. Maybe the rest of the trilogy could never have lived up to that. But at least this book was more engaging than the second one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more