Evie’s been queen of Bellona for a year. While she’s survived plenty of sinister plots and assassination attempts, she knows that her position will never be secure until she can defeat the threat of Morta once and for all – and the Regalia Games seem to be the perfect time for that.
This is the final book in the Crown of Shards trilogy. While I loved the first book, I found the second rather disappointing, so I was hoping that the author would be able to regain her bearings and stick the landing in this one. And stick the landing she did! Well, mostly.
We return to form here for Evie, with lots of politicking, desperate plans, and a good mix of action and scheming. I liked seeing all of Evie’s crew again, as well as meeting old friends and new as all the kingdoms came together for a sort of pseudo-Olympics. It was cool to see Evie develop her powers further and establish herself as a strong queen, and I enjoyed how she held onto the core of who she was all the same. While I predicted some aspects of her plans, I did not guess at all of them, and enjoyed the twists.
However, I did feel that we are left with more loose ends at the end of the book than I would like, possibly because the author already had planned a spinoff series at this point. As such, the mystery of Fortuna’s ladies remains completely unresolved. Word count constraints seem to have also left some secondary characters’ plots to be resolved off-page. Mostly I was really disappointed with how Sully is portrayed. After winning Evie’s heart in the last book, he utterly retreats in this one to a stock love interest character. I never felt like they were a married couple, which they are more-or-less meant to be after the events of the previous book.
