Robin's Reviews > Lightbringer

↠ 2 stars

To anyone out there wondering why I need therapy, I would like to present into evidence this entire book. Lightbringer is the culmination of a lot of things, but it is first and foremost where Eliana and Rielles Journey draws to a close. We begin right where Kingsbane left off, with Rielle descending even further into darkness after fleeing with Corien, and Eliana having been captured by the enemy.

In many ways, this book was absolutely nothing like I expected. New character perspectives were introduced that weren’t there previously and the plot development went in an entirely new direction. For a good chunk of the book there is a stalemate, as Corien plans to use Eliana and Simon to travel back to Old Celdaria, and she promptly refuses. In the past, Rielle, allied with Corien, pushes the limits of her power in order to break down the gate and release the angels trapped there. The first half of the book felt really slow going, which given that this was the conclusion to the trilogy, I really didn’t enjoy. However, I do feel that the last half more than made up for the somewhat glacial pace that the book started out on.

Unsurprisingly, time travel played a significant role in the final book, and, while this was the direction I thought the story was going to take, I felt it definitely could have been handled a lot better. Combined with the pacing of the last quarter, there came a moment where everything seemed to be on fast forward and there was so much more to grapple with over a shorter page count. The author just had so many characters to take care of, she ended up pushing half of them abruptly out of the picture at the last second, using time travel as the tool to do so. Out of the multiple perspectives that were added in, only one or two really needed to be there, the others just took so much away from Rielle and Eliana’s points of view. Maybe if those had been scaled back a bit, then the ending could have been handled with a bit more care.

It’s clear that Claire Legrand plans to do more with this world and its characters, but more effort needed to be put into creating a satisfying conclusion for the trilogy. I think more closure was certainly needed with Eliana and Simon, and I could have used a bit less character assassination on her part. I can definitely see how she wanted things to come full circle, it just was not executed accordingly. If you need me, I’ll be sticking to one of the many alternate endings I created upon finishing this book in order to cope.