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A review by tularoo
The Map of Stars by Laura Ruby
4.0
AHHHHH!!! This book...frustrated me. Let me be clear though, I LOVED this series. My kids did too & we were SO excited for the last installment. Despite horrible editing (seriously, who proofed this book? Missing words were EVERYWHERE), the series has intrigued us from the first page. Knowing that this last book would be (hopefully) wrapping up SO. MANY. QUESTIONS. we had high hopes. Things started looking less hopeful the more we read. The many questions we had seemed to multiply the further we got in the book. By the time we were about 60 pages from the end, my kids & I were discussing how it would be possible to wrap things up in such a short period of time. Short answer? You can't.
Laura Ruby's amazing world building & character development was just as fantastic in previous books, but the action become seemingly unwieldy for her to control. The sense of adventure that she so meticulously created in the previous books seemed to unravel as more variables were introduced. The flash forward sequences only stoked the fires of curiosity, and in the end, only confused the plot. As a lifetime reader, I sort of got what she was going for, but my kids (7 1/2 & 13) were both left with the dissatisfying sense of no closure.
That being said, if you've read the first two, you'd still want to read this third book. The ending might make you go "WHUT THE WHUT-WHUT?!" but the world-building is no less amazing.
Laura Ruby's amazing world building & character development was just as fantastic in previous books, but the action become seemingly unwieldy for her to control. The sense of adventure that she so meticulously created in the previous books seemed to unravel as more variables were introduced. The flash forward sequences only stoked the fires of curiosity, and in the end, only confused the plot. As a lifetime reader, I sort of got what she was going for, but my kids (7 1/2 & 13) were both left with the dissatisfying sense of no closure.
That being said, if you've read the first two, you'd still want to read this third book. The ending might make you go "WHUT THE WHUT-WHUT?!" but the world-building is no less amazing.