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A review by sgbrux
The Finish Line by Kate Stewart
4.0
“If I seem eager, it’s because I want to erase every touch that wasn’t mine.”
I adored the finale to what has been an emotionally zapping, heartrending trilogy. After telling my high school best friend about the books, I was lucky enough to have her as my reading buddy, and now that we've both finished, we find ourselves in the midst of a major reading coma.
This book will sit with you, it'll capture your mental space and your emotional energy, and will have you lingering around the house, listening to sad music while day-drinking about the past. Or at least that's what it did for me.
In The Finish Line, you get to read from Cecelia and Tobias's POVs, and the timeline skips around quite a bit from the present to various years in the past: Tobias at 14, 16, 21...37...You're given several moments that illustrate how close Tobias and Dominic were—Sean, too—and any questions you may have had in the series up until that point are answered. We gain so much perspective on what Tobias was thinking and feeling when the events of the first book went down, and it made him a more fleshed-out character to me.
And Cecelia has her moments, too. She's no longer the girl she was in Flock. She's a grown woman, a scorned and very hurt woman, who is closed off and suspicious of everyone. There's a little twist toward the end that had me cheering her on, and it was so good to see a woman own her power and influence, which is always a treat to see.
One scene between Sean and Tobias particularly got me—it was the closure I needed for them, but that didn't make it hurt any less. The past scenes with Dom made me sad and I could feel Tobias's guilt for his choices back then—it cut me deeply.
This is a 4.5-star book for me. There were some small pacing and flashback/flashforward issues I had, but overall, I loved the conclusions these characters received. I'm glad Kate decided to write a full novel rather than just an epilogue chapter to the first two books.
The story and its characters deserved it.
I adored the finale to what has been an emotionally zapping, heartrending trilogy. After telling my high school best friend about the books, I was lucky enough to have her as my reading buddy, and now that we've both finished, we find ourselves in the midst of a major reading coma.
This book will sit with you, it'll capture your mental space and your emotional energy, and will have you lingering around the house, listening to sad music while day-drinking about the past. Or at least that's what it did for me.
In The Finish Line, you get to read from Cecelia and Tobias's POVs, and the timeline skips around quite a bit from the present to various years in the past: Tobias at 14, 16, 21...37...You're given several moments that illustrate how close Tobias and Dominic were—Sean, too—and any questions you may have had in the series up until that point are answered. We gain so much perspective on what Tobias was thinking and feeling when the events of the first book went down, and it made him a more fleshed-out character to me.
And Cecelia has her moments, too. She's no longer the girl she was in Flock. She's a grown woman, a scorned and very hurt woman, who is closed off and suspicious of everyone. There's a little twist toward the end that had me cheering her on, and it was so good to see a woman own her power and influence, which is always a treat to see.
One scene between Sean and Tobias particularly got me—it was the closure I needed for them, but that didn't make it hurt any less. The past scenes with Dom made me sad and I could feel Tobias's guilt for his choices back then—it cut me deeply.
This is a 4.5-star book for me. There were some small pacing and flashback/flashforward issues I had, but overall, I loved the conclusions these characters received. I'm glad Kate decided to write a full novel rather than just an epilogue chapter to the first two books.
The story and its characters deserved it.