• Lindsey Dahling •'s Reviews > Finale

This thing is a disaster. It’s so poorly written and paced that I couldn’t ever decide if Stephanie Garber had too many ideas or not enough for this book.

Look, I’m perfectly willing to admit that I find Caraval to be barely tolerable and Legendary to be fine while everyone else in the world is bananas for them, so I’m probably the weird one.

Let me give you an example of what every page of Finale felt like to me:

Scarlett/Tella walk into the room and immediately notice and then describe to me the colors of the walls, ceiling, floor, lamps, picture frames, spider in the corner, tissue box, 12 specks of dust, random old shoe, human skeleton, liver, fava beans, Hannibal Lector’s eyes, and anything else you can possibly think of that’s completely irrelevant to the plot.



And these lists of colors are always, ALWAYS followed up with comparisons of the colors to something abstract (typically in simile form, but Garber did pass 6th grade ELA, so she shows you she can use a metaphor, too) in a way that MAKES NO SENSE. So, the moldy old shoe is green and smells like heartbreak and rollercoaster wind.



Once Scarlett/Tella has finished with this annoying AF narration, they will then spend 4 seconds on the conflict they’ve discovered is currently happening in the room. (For this non-spoilery review, we’re going to say they walked into a room full of poisonous snakes.) “Uh oh! Snakes!” And so, Scarlett/Tella spend the next two whole sentences rounding up the snakes and tossing them out the window into the garden—where the snakes happily slither away off into the sunset. Action over. Conflict over. Back to generic YA pining and terrible similes.




No buildup to anything. No lasting conflict. Things just happen randomly and then they’re over. Some obstacles come up just for the sake of wasting time, as Garber never mentions them again (and there’s a GIANT one that she just never tied up—I’m only bitter about it because it was literally the only part of the book that got dangerously close to interesting).

The ending was anticlimactic. It was another thing that was entirely too rushed for no apparent reason, for it’s not like she was tying up loose ends (STILL BITTER).

I don’t know. Just about everyone else in the world loves these books. And then there’s loser me—desperately trying for two books to understand the “cool” crowd and now just giving up entirely because a) bitter and b) this book put me in a 3 week reading slump, which makes me even more bitter. Rude.