HUMPH. I AM DISPLEASED.
Spoilers to follow.
But first: This is the third book in a trilogy that basically, for me, has been the Gemma-and-Kartik (that’s his name) show, with some other stuff about magic or something going on as well. To be brutally honest, I haven’t been terribly interested in the main story, so I’ve just been carrying on reading in the hopes that Gemma and Kartik would move to The Land Where People Don’t Care About Race and get married and have lots of little babies.
AND THEN KARTIK WENT AND DIED, DAMMIT.
I mean, I knew that was going to happen, because I read the end before I read the middle, but I was still extremely outraged when I got to it in real time. And I’m still cross.
And you know what else? You know what else I’m cross about? I’ll tell you! I’m cross about the unsubtle foreshadowing of Felicity’s tendencies by mentioning Oscar Wilde. I mean COME ON. I already figured it out anyway but then Ms. Bray went and put that in and it’s not that I don’t support Oscar Wilde whole-heartedly, because God knows I do, but seriously, once she said that it was glaringly obvious and thus she completely prevented me from feeling smug and clever when The Truth Was Revealed. And, you know, I like feeling clever about plot points that I predict without reading them at the end of the book; because as a trend, I am not using my brain to predict things when I am reading, so I very very rarely guess things before they happen, including really obvious things like that the guy named Lupin who got sick all the time during the full moon and had to have Snape take over his class and teach about werewolves, was a werewolf.
Yeah, that was dumb. But I did have an incredibly brilliant epiphany about this plot point in the fifth Harry Potter book, and damn, that was smart of me.
Anyway, I don’t like it that Libba Bray messed up my high opinion of myself.
AND ALSO KARTIK DIED. I mean what was the point of all those saucy dreams she kept having about kissing him (with tongue, the scandalous wench!) if he was just going to die at the end? THERE ARE RULES about these things (that exist in my brain) whereby the hero of the story, and I think we can agree that Kartik was the only candidate for that, is supposed to survive. DEVIANCE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.