MY ⭐️ RATING: 2/5
Format: Kindle Whispersync
BOOK DESCRIPTION
As Marat’s siege engine bores through the Tower, erupting inside ringdoms and leaving chaos in its wake, Senlin can do nothing but observe the mayhem from inside the belly of the beast.
Caught in a charade, Senlin desperately tries to sabotage the rampaging Hod King, even as Marat’s objective grows increasingly clear. The leader of the zealots is bound for the Sphinx’s lair and the unimaginable power it contains. In the city under glass at the Tower’s summit, Adam discovers a utopia where everyone inexplicably knows the details of his past. As Adam unravels the mystery of his fame, he soon discovers the crowning ringdom conceals a much darker secret. Aboard the State of Art, Edith and her crew adjust to the reality that Voleta has awoken from death changed. She seems to share more in common with the Red Hand now than her former self. While Edith wars for the soul of the young woman, a greater crisis looms: They will have to face Marat on unequal footing and with Senlin caught in the crossfire.
And when the Bridge of Babel is finally opened, and the Brick Layer’s true ambition revealed, neither they nor the Tower will ever be the same again.
MY REVIEW
I’m not a fan of leaving bad reviews, and typically when disliking something this much, I’d DNF it, but because this was the last book and I wanted to know how things ended, I decided that I would finish it. I’m not really sure what Bancroft was thinking when he was writing this, because this is nothing at all like it’s predecessors… far from it, almost as if he was ready to start something else so he just put something out. I know ending are probably the hardest thing to write, and I respect the lead up to get here, but this ending is on a level of Game of Thrones or How I Met Your Mother bad. It could’ve been so much more, but it was just something.
For starters, Senlin’s role goes from main character to co-main character in the first three, to side character in this final installment of The Books of Babel. To make matters worse, the first 27% of the book, which is 170 pages or 7 hours, is from the pov of Adam… who was only mentioned in The Hod King after he was separated from the crew in Arm of the Sphinx. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure why some of this wasn’t in THK, that way it didn’t feel so out of place when you jumped into TFOB to have such a major part of the book focused on a character who just randomly pops back in.
Bancroft continues to do a great job with his beautiful prose that can easily light up a room, and letting us enjoy these wonderful characters, and the story itself did a good job of answering questions that we had all along, but at a certain point of just feeling down and out, nothing really ever brought me back up to want to love this the way I thought it should be loved. On a final note, the narration by John Banks was incredible throughout this series, and though I may not have enjoyed the book, his narration was one of the things that kept me driving towards the ending.
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