(See my review of the second book in the Soldier Son series here.)
I have mixed feelings about the conclusion to this series, and by extension, about the series as a whole. There were quite a few long-awaited revelations contained in this installment, but the density of them, compared with the sparsity of similar information in earlier books, seemed more than a little rushed. The way all the loose ends got bundled together and knotted off in the last few dozen pages was also more than a little jarring. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I think, most likely, the series was either one book too long or about three books too short - the information should have been this dense all along, or else spread out over rather more story.
...not that I think there was that much more story to tell, and cramming the story there was into two-thirds the space would have been suboptimal, too, so, hell, I don't know. It's just not quite right as it is, anyway.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed it while reading it, and plan to re-read the entire series at some point without waiting a year or more between installments, and perhaps I'll think of it differently when I read the series as something more closely approaching a cohesive whole. (At the least, I'll be able to judge more accurately whether it is a cohesive whole, so that'll be good.) And while the ending, as I said above, feels rushed, I don't feel cheated by it - I think the story does right by its reader, if perhaps not in the most elegant fashion possible.
