Review: Ruin and Rising

Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read and enjoyed both Shadow and Bone and Siege and Storm, it should come as no surprise to find out I was eager to dive into Ruin and Rising.

With Shadow and Bone, I found myself considering the series to be much like many other young adult fantasy books on the market. It was fun, but it didn’t really stand out to me all that much. With Siege and Storm, I felt as though the series really found what it wanted to be. With Ruin and Rising, I received an okay ending to a series I had high hopes for.

Don’t get me wrong, this final book was enjoyable enough. I gave it a four-star rating, which shows it wasn’t the disaster some trilogy endings happen to be. However, I had been expecting something a bit more from this one. I had been hoping for some big scenes, for lots of twists, and a powerful ending – what we were given felt far too clean for me, far too easy.

In Siege and Storm, we received new characters and more plot lines. Ruin and Rising continues with this – we get to see what happens with old and new characters, and we get to see how the plot lines come together. There is fun to be had, but it is not the mind-blowing read Siege and Storm had left me hoping for.

I’ll be honest, I worked out the majority of what was going to happen well in advance. Plenty of hints were dropped throughout the series, and I was holding out for certain things to surprise me. There were surprises to be had, I will admit to that, but it was not in the way I had expected. The things I thought I had worked out ended up being true, but there were some unexpected twists thrown in for some of the characters throughout.

My biggest disappointment, however, was how easily everything came together in the end. We were building up to something so big, and I feel as though everything happened far too easily. I wanted something more, something much more. This happens quite often with young adult fantasy books – I hype myself up for great big conclusions, and things come together far too easily.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy watching the way everything came together in this one. This one was just as addictive as the two prior books, and I was turning pages at a rapid pace to get my answers.

Without a doubt, it certainly left me more than willing to read more of the Grisha books.

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