A review by annettebooksofhopeanddreams
My Savage Empire by Steffanie Holmes

4.0

Another last book. Another one of those that has been on my shelves for ages already. I even thought about reading this one quite a few times already, but at the last minute I always picked another book. And strangely enough I know I don't have to say goodbye to the characters. There is a spin-off, of which I accidentally already read the first book, starring the best friend and a next gen story. However, before I wanted to continue those I wanted to finish this one.

This book is slightly chaotic. Or well, it's actually really chaotic. And in a way it means that it's sometimes hard to keep track of where the plot goes. But in another way it also really fits the kind of story this is. Claudia is improvising. She's good at it, mostly, but she's playing with big guys who had years of planning, plotting and improvising under their belt. The combination DOES lead to chaos, although Holmes is that brilliant that in the end she manages to get everything back together.

A lot of storylines have started in the previous three books and I was quite curious how Holmes was gonna solve them all. And as if solving everything wasn't hard enough, Holmes also added some curve balls in this book changing everything we and the characters in the book thought we knew. But by doing so she really managed to connect all those storylines, to show us that they actually weren't all separate exciting plots. They were all part of one big plot.

And along the way she also gave Claudia some major character growth. It's often said, but sometimes you need to lose what you have to learn that you already had everything you needed. Sometimes we only see true value when we're on the brink of losing something. Claudia learns that the hard way, but it's also very fitting that she has to learn it. She was brought up a certain way, she only had seen love in a certain way. She had to learn what love truly is.

Although I liked the first book in the series best, I really enjoyed this satisfying conclusion to the series and I'm now really looking forward to the spin-offs.