Review: The Winner's Kiss by Marie Rutkoski

A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.

It was worth it completing the whole series, but this installment was a lot clunkier than the rest.

Even though this book dragged at points, I actually think it could have benefitted from being longer, or split into two. Because the reason it dragged was not that the plot wasn't exciting—it's that it wasn't developed.

It felt like much too short an amount of time to accomplish a convincing prison camp, amnesia, and entire war plot-line. So while the twists and turns were interesting, they flew by too quickly to feel as meaningful as the previous two books with slower, but more in-depth, paces.

I think we also lost the thread a little here of the themes that made the previous books feel special: the uncomfortable internal reckoning that comes with colonization and your people's place in it. That's a hefty theme for a YA novel, and it is handled very well throughout this series, but I feel like it was less emphasized in the finale. Which is a shame because that is what stood out to me the most with these books.

I also felt much less for the romance in this book compared to the others. There are so many miscommunications, forced separations, betrayals, etc. throughout the series, that instead of it feeling triumphant and cathartic when the characters can finally be together, it's pretty anticlimactic. It's too convoluted of a journey for the reader to be easily satisfied by a particular declaration of love. And maybe that makes for a more realistic love story, but a less exciting one in terms of narrative.

Even though I have some critiques for this installment, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this series. It was exactly what I was in the mood for when I started it, and I'm relieved to be reminded that solid YA fantasy is still out there. (You might just have to go a little farther into your backlist to find it...)