YA Steampunk Mad Max… with ALIENS!

This is the last book in the trilogy and, sadly, the first book I’ve read. (I promise to never do this again.) The book isn’t completely befuddling, but I can’t say it stands alone at all. Readers are thrown immediately into a high-pressure crisis with giant spider-like alien machines coming to destroy a post-apocalyptic city. It’s difficult to tell how old anyone is, as it’s never recapped. You gradually gather that there is something called The Tone that turns adults into mindless husks around the age of 20, although there are some who are immune without explanation.

Until near the very end, I couldn’t tell how long ago in the worldbuilding timeline the alien invasion had occurred. I’d been assuming it was many decades—perhaps even centuries. But in the last few chapters got the impression it was less than a decade. (Knowing Zoe’s age would have helped, but that info was never given in this book.)

In the hopes of saving some readers trouble, I’ll admit I was personally hoping for futuristic sci-fi. What I got was sci-fi dusted fantasy. There were so many physics-defying objects and concepts, it was easier just to do a mental {insert incomprehensible space-magic here}. There’s lots of high action, massive-scale battles, and time spent in a killer mousetrap-like arena. The writing is serviceable, if not a bit over-complicated in the plot department. The prose sometimes felt like it needed tightening. For example:

"Ahead of them probably ten miles distant, something massive and huge towered over the desert... It was a city. A big one. It's name was Faust."
(Hint: The words ‘massive’, ‘huge’, and ‘big’ all used to describe the same thing in a single paragraph.)

There’s a cardboard cutout good-guy army dying left and right, but it’s difficult to feel any kind of way about that. (Again, maybe if I’d read one or both of the previous books I would have felt more attached. My bad.) And for most of this multi-POV book, the female characters (namely Mira, Olive, and Avril) all felt indistinct and interchangeable. Ravan being the exception, as she came off as almost entirely masculine until the end. (Although, her presumed history of sexual abuse made that trait believable.)

For those looking for romance, this book is overall lacking—as the hero and heroine are separated almost from the get-go and Holt is left presuming Mira is dead. (They have just enough time for a sex scene with no mention or regard for contraception, despite how exceedingly non-conducive the whole end-of-the-world scenario is to pregnancy.) Holt then spends the vast majority of the book in a sort of non-functional mourning state that made him EXTREMELY difficult to empathize with. His supposed love for Zoey (the basis for which isn’t really recapped) and hope for saving humanity is apparently not enough to drive him further than apathy.

This reader’s biggest pet peeve was set off in the form of fact-checking. I need to preface this assertion by saying I have no idea if this story is supposed to be taking place in some alternate universe where none of our usual rules (such as visible color scales and human audio perception range) ever applied. From what I read, I can only presume this was set in our present-day world which just happened to be overrun by energy-based aliens with a knack for possessing machinery. Unless I missed something major (and if I did please correct me) at no point in this book is the reader told that the alien invasion altered said natural human perceptions. Yet, in the middle of a somber funeral speech that is apparently meant to inspire the masses, the character Dane recites the following:

"There are not more than five musical notes," he recanted."Yet the combinations give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard."

Wait…what?
First off, I think he either meant "chanted" or "recounted," not recanted. Secondly, there ARE more than five musical notes. o.O I'm no musician, but I'm pretty sure there are 12 notes per octave if you include half notes, 7 if you don't.

Dane’s speech continues…

"There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues then can ever be seen."

While I see the point he's striving for, I'm not sure where he's getting his info. There are three primary colors—Red, Yellow, & Blue for artists; cyan, magenta, and yellow for printers (so, yes, technically not more than five, I suppose...) And why is 5 the super magic number?

Not only could I not take the speech seriously, but these info declarations pulled me completely out of the story to go do research and verify that I wasn’t completely misinformed. I never really recovered from that point on.