More gory action, a two planet (of sorts) war to end the dragon's cruel hold on Loom, changing feelings among the main players, treachery, more cliffhangers at chapter ends and an oh-so-satisfying ending for The White Wraith and her dragon lover. What a great series this is! ( )

Another trilogy that could not stick the landing. I still posit that the Loom Saga would have been better as a duology, with the first book ending with the destruction of the guilds and the second book ending with the victory lap from this book. The second book felt like a lot of build up with no real story of its own, perhaps to be redeemed with a massive climax....except the 3rd book re-tread a lot of the same buildup and the finale was anti-climactic.

A lot of the same issues from books 1 and 2 were present here. Kova does a lot of telling, not showing. When she does show, she often follows it up immediately by re-iterating the point by telling. More often than not when she does show, its with a simile that is drawn out to ludicrous lengths. Instead of being evocative, it leaves the prose just tiresome and redundant. There's still the numerous typos and grammatical/formatting errors. There's still continuity errors - for example, in one conversation Colette switches several times between making perfect dragons and making perfect chimera. I was frequently reminded of the student papers I grade. They often add all these superfluous carrier phrases to pad out length and vary sentence length/structure in a meaningless way - bad habits encouraged by page minimums in undergrad. And I thought, "These feel like NaNos." And sure enough, Kova is an avid NaNoWriMo participant. Not that I am knocking NaNoWriMo - I've participated (and 'won') five times. But NaNo teaches some dreadful writing habits and discourages the very editing that would address them. I admire Kova's work ethic and self-discipline, and desire to give the fans what they want. I just think that fans would be happy waiting a few more months for a more polished, higher-quality product.

Other parts of the book are just contradictory. Ari and her fellow Rivets are sooooo logical that she is perplexed by a Dragon building having round windows...but later the Rivet guildhall is presented as being built in the most illogical place ever and it makes total sense to Ari. Ari is talked out and praised as if she is totally logical...but she is responsible for most of the emotional outbursts up to and including literal foaming at the mouth with emotion.

There's long stretches of Rebels in which little to nothing happens. A lot of the 'big' events the books lead up to either don't happen (e.g., the army of perfect dragons, the dono visiting Loom), or they fizzle out (e.g., Cverah slowing time and letting Ari kill the dono without much fuss, Fae being taken out so quickly and easily, flowers being saved pretty much immediately). There's supposedly a lot of loss of life and resources on Loom, but it never feels like the situation has changed in a meaningful fashion. (It brings to mind the Star Wars prequels and how tone-deaf they were to the repercussions of war.) Flor took a weird, distressing turn in her development, from self-assured bad ass to an arrogant douche. I did like that she was a lesbian, but her relationship with Shanra was really sad - Shanra doesn't have an identity/personality outside of 'Flor's FWB' and its heavily implied that Shanra is just a substitute for Ari (and would be dropped like a bad habit had Ari been interested. SO HAPPY Ari wasn't because teachers fucking students is GROSS and I wish that trope would die already). Other characters act uncharacteristically - I'm still unsure why Ari would trust the King after so many shady things went down involving him and his involvement was 100% unnecessary. But it was needed for the plot to happen so...

The ending is a literal deus ex machina in which everyone is saved with the poorly-described, ill-defined wish magic.

I've been rough on the trilogy. You're probably wondering why I read all three. Part was just it was an easy, quick read compared to what I have to read for school. But really the big issue for me is there was so much damn potential. The magic system was so interesting! The world was unique! There's so many great and interesting ideas here that don't get to be fully explored, or aren't written to their full potential, because the book was so hastily put together. There's so many deep themes and elements here that are only shallowly presented. It legit makes me angry! Because with 3-6 months editing per book with the same fervor with which it was written, these could have been utterly phenomenal.

Instead, we get a first draft NaNo riddled with typos and run-on sentences and cliches.
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