The Immortal Heights - Sherry Thomas (Elemental Trilogy #3)

So, I've finally come to the end of this trilogy.  Though perhaps "finally" isn't the best word for it, because it didn't actually take me that long and it's not like I had to wait for any of the book to come out or anything.  The second book had left me somewhat disappointed; the world-building and timeline seemed scattered and there seemed to be a lot of contradictions embedded in the story that were not addressed.  Fortunately, most of those are dealt with here in one way or another.  Unfortunately, the way that most of them were resolved was just by making the main characters too short-sighted to see most of the things I had picked up on a long time ago.

The story itself picks up right where The Perilous Sea left off: with Iolanthe, Titus, Kashkari, and a bunch of rebels facing down the Bane's forces in the Sahara.  The battle and subsequent flight takes up a bit of the book and then it's a scramble on to Atlantis with a couple of very foreboding prophecies hanging in the near future, including several deaths.

I'm not sure there's really a lot to say about this one.  I liked it better than the second, because it didn't feel quite so trite; there was no "let's give everyone amnesia to drag things out!" here.  Instead, it actually felt like there was a lot of motion and not a lot of dithering, which was good.  Also, the Crucible makes a larger appearance in this book than it did in the second.  Considering that one of the things that I disliked about the second book was the lack of Crucible, and it was also one of the strongest parts of the first book, seeing its return was great.  The supporting characters were also great, Kashkari in particular.  He is definitely deserving of being a main character in his own right, and it's kind of a pity that he got shoved to the role of sidekick here.

However, a few gaps really remained here.  One of the biggest ones was the portals associated with the Crucible.  Before, it had been put out that the exit portals to the Crucible were in different places, but in this case, the characters re-traced an earlier path and came out somewhere different; shouldn't the final portal have been in that really dangerous canyon that they encountered briefly in the second book?  Did I miss something here?  Some of the timelines, such as Iolanthe's birth, also seem like they remained scattered and then were just disregarded because they seemed like they were too complicated or inconvenient.  While this did tie things up, it didn't seem like it really worked and felt more lazy than anything else.

The ending was ultimately satisfactory, but had a few weird bits to it, as well.  I'm not entirely sure that I agree with how Thomas went about it, because it seems like more difficulties would be encountered for Iolanthe, and it read kind of like a "where are they now" ending, which I hate, but it was still okay.  I think the rest of the book basically made up for it.

Overall, I really enjoyed this trilogy.  It was a fun fantasy, making use of a lot of elements that I really enjoyed and a time period that, while increasingly common, is still underutilized in fantasy.  I'd definitely be interested in more of Thomas' fantasy in the future, though I'd like see some of her minority characters in main roles instead of just being stuck as sidekicks!

4 stars out of 5.