This is the conclusion to the Fire and Thorns trilogy. You can read my review of volume one in this trilogy, The Girl of Fire and Thorns here, and my review of volume two, The Crown of Embers here. The Graceling trilogy ends with Bitter Blue. this trilogy ends with Bitter Kingdom Hmm... What, me, suspicious? Nah!
The Bitter Kingdom is really The Lord of the Rings for a YA audience. We have a magician (Elisa) and a male elf (Storm) and a hobbit/dwarf (Red), and an expert with a bow (Mara), and a hunter (Belén), and a female elf (Waterfall) and a soldier (Hector) and they're off on a road trip traversing forest and mountains. This applies to the chase to rescue Hector to some extent, but it's particularly à propos of the trip after the visit to Invierno's capital, and especially when they subsequently enter the mines as a result of the heavy snow in the mountains. You can’t tell me that Carson wasn't consciously emulating Tolkien's tome when she wrote her novel, and I can’t believe either that no one else hasn’t thought of these parallels.
There is another parallel, too, in that we have two magicians (Elisa and Storm), and yet neither of them can offer anything to really help in this story. Elisa and Storm cannot hasten their journey to rescue Hector, nor rescue him without undertaking that journey. Neither of them can offer anything to hasten their pursuit of the Invierno animagi later, not even by vaporising the snow (and thereby avoiding the ice), or providing protection from it for their party. This impotence of the magi is a constant theme throughout this and all such magical novels, and also in fiction where a god is involved, such as in the Bible, wherein the god cannot effectively contribute a damned thing and has to demand that mere mortals do his bidding all the time to get anything done at all! For example, he can’t keep Noah and the animals safe - he has to force Noah to build an impossible ark and capture the animals/gather the food himself! He can’t simply vaporize the walls of Jericho, nor even knock them down without having Joshua parade around in a farcical ritual. He can’t save humanity from the very sins he himself dumped on it without raping a virgin and slaughtering her child in a blood sacrifice! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
The same was true in LotR, where Gandalf really didn’t do a heck of a lot. I mean, if he can summon giant eagles to fly Frodo and Sam away from the erupting volcano, why couldn't he summon them to transport Frodo and the ring to Mount Doom in the first place?! Stupid, stupid, stupid! It makes no sense, but having said that, I did enjoy this novel rather a lot. After some issues with the middle child of this trilogy, it was nice to find that the third in the series was one where I didn't find so many things to dislike! It was very easy reading And I blew through it without it feeling like it was any effort at all. That's the sign of a master story-teller! You do have to check your brain at the door a bit, and go with it for the sake of mindless entertainment, or you have to decide not to read it at all. I chose the former.
Despite it being a while since I read the two previous volumes (and I was late coming to this trilogy) it really didn't take me very long to get back into it and start really enjoying it. Carson offers no lead-in to volume three, so you have to recall what happened in the previous volumes, but she does provide a pointer here and there without them becoming a tedious rehash. The first part of the novel (actually, the entire novel, let's face it!) is a "road" trip as Elisa sets off with three companions across desert, forest, and mountain in hot pursuit of the group which abducted her fiancé, Hector. This novel (as were the previous two) is written in young Queen Elisa's first-person PoV, so I didn't appreciate Hector's first person PoV being added to the mix. I could have done without that, especially since I saw no point at all to it. It really struck a sour note for me because his attitude towards Elisa during his captivity was completely different from what he displayed to her after the party caught up with and freed him! Weird.
But once he was freed, it was then down to Elisa to decide whether to flee back to her own land while she has the chance, or to confront the Invierno people, and of course, being Elisa, she decides to do the latter, to see if it's possible for peace to reign over the two quite different peoples. Meanwhile she has been practicing strongly with her magical powers, trying to produce fire as the animagi do, and she succeeds without too much effort, as does, surprisingly, Storm, her Invierno companion. She also has her "maidservant" Mara traveling with her, along with her trusted "right-hand man", Belén. In addition to this is the malingering Hector, of course, recovering from his ill-treatment at the hands of his kidnappers, and a very young (and nameless) slave girl whom Elisa had bought from the former's ill-using owner. Finally they sit at the outskirts of the Invierno capital city, and Elisa needs to figure out how to go about making peace.
Carson needs to do some work on her biology and eco systems. Post-Invierno, down in the mines they run into scorpion-like creatures they call death-stalkers, one of which is huge. The problem with this is that there is nothing down there in the caves and mines to sustain them, so why on Earth would there be literally hundreds of them? What would they eat? What did the mother eat to grow to the size of a rhinoceros (or however big she was)? I can deal with scorpions (I actually found one in my bathtub one night - must have crawled up the drain!), but I can’t deal with the poor plotting which has these creatures showing up without any logic to any of it, and for no other reason than a cheap thrill, and to pointlessly kill off a character.
I was also a bit disappointed in the ending. It was fine enough as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough, because there was too much left unexplained. If this were the first of a series, that would be fine, but it was the last of a series, and there were serious questions left unanswered. The first of these was all about the godstone: what was the deal with these things? Nothing about them was explained at all: not why they were given to some and not to others, not why each bearer of a "living godstone" had a dumb-ass quest (as did Lucera-Elisa in this volume), not why far more magic was available to the godstone-bearer than such a paltry quest needed. Indeed, none was needed for Elisa's quest (except to get her to the location where she needed to fulfill it. The other, and bigger question for me was tied to the origin of the non-Invierno people. Where did they come from? Why (and how) were they brought to the Invierno planet and by whom? What kind of power is it that comes up from the ground to power the godstone magic? None of this is answered.
Other than that (and that's a big that!) the ending sufficed. It wasn't brilliant. It did show that Elisa would be fine as she was - without the need for artificial aids in her life, but there were a lot of relatively minor loose ends left hanging, blowing in the wind, not least of which is what the heck the title was supposed to mean, exactly! Even at the end of the novel this wasn't clear! However, since I really enjoyed this novel overall, and the series as well, I have no problem rating this a worthy read and recommending this entire series. Bon Appétitle!
