This book is not aimed at people like me: middle-aged men with thinning hair and bags beneath their eyes; professors of literature and old farts who have read Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nabokov and think that's how 'it' (let's say, for the sake of argument, Russia) should be done. There are people—other people than I, young people, eager people—for whom books such as this are written. People who don't experience a sinking of the heart at the dead facility with which commercially successful franchises can be mashed together (of 'Grisha' Book 1, The Stylist magazine lamented 'it's like The Hunger Games meets Potter meets Twilight meets Lord of the Rings'. Wait. Did I say 'lamented'? I meant: gushed enthusiastically). There are people for whom Bardugo's Fantasy-Russia 'Ravka' makes a refreshing change to Westeros and District 13 and wherever it is Divergent is set (Chicago, is it?). People who find the Goth intensity and doomed love story of the main character Alina dreamy and wondrous, not cloying and shallow. Bardugo's villain is called 'The Darkling', and it's nothing to do with Keats's bird. It's because he's dark; and Evil in this universe is a literal darkness ('The Shadow Fold') and Good is manifested as a hero with the skills of a 'Sun-Summoner', like the refrain from that song by the cockernay Chimney Sweep in Mary Poppins. Because some people don't find crashing literalness of imagination deadening. They think it's cool. Good luck to those people. May they enjoy this turgid, drawn-out, talky finale to the Grisha trilogy. May they likewise enjoy their lives, and the company of their fellows; may they laugh and dance and drink wine together in the sunshine.
I am not of them.
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