Beta Lyrae

I'm happy with it! There were some slight continuity glitches and some parts did seem awfully rushed, but overall, I loved this book. The audiobook is good if still over-dramatic at some points. I really enjoyed Julius and Marci's endgame, and Bob and Amelia were great as usual.


I'm seriously astonished that no one died. Permanently, anyway. (Although there haven't been many established-character deaths in the series—Bixby, Estella, and Jessica, and that's it. The Three Sisters don't really count.)

After four books of being alternately boggled and creeped out by Bob's eldritch pigeon, I now love her. And I kinda ship her with Bob. His proposal was genuinely romantic! And she sacrificed her futures to help him! And... well, considering how much a theme of the books it's been that no species (dragons, humans, Mortal Spirits, nature spirits, etc) is evil or beyond hope, I'm really glad that we had a second Nameless End as a counterpoint to the Leviathan's eagerness to break the rules and eat a living plane.

I also expected Marci to bargain with the Final Future, rather than Julius's talk-to-Algonquin strategy actually working. Bob's chosen future was lousy because he only had dragon futures to bargain with; Marci could've spoken for humans and spirits and traded all of their "everybody dies" futures for something better. I can kind of see why that didn't happen—talking Algonquin around was a lot more thematically appropriate, as was Julius sacrificing himself to give an enemy another chance—but it kind of seemed like a dropped thread in a way.

It kind of seemed like when this book and the last one were separated, Marci's arc went into A Dragon of a Different Color and Julius's into Last Dragon Standing. I mean, they both do stuff in both books, but Julius basically helped other people with their problems last time, and this time Marci spends a big chunk of the book on the banishment plot, which fails to work. (Although there were some cool moments along the way.)

With so many characters, it's not surprising that some of the cast got short shrift this time—Chelsie and Xian were kind of out of focus, Frederick got basically just the one big moment, Conrad returned to the background—but I loved the character moments we did get. The stand-out for me was Justin explaining why he never told Julius who their dad was—that was genuinely sweet, especially for him—but I also loved Svena and Amelia's reunion (okay, that might be my real favorite), Svena and Ian's mid-battle custody dispute, Bethesda's moment to gloat about being the mother of one-fourth of her species (... look, I hate Bethesda as much as the next person, but the slut-shaming really annoyed me, so I'm glad she got to get back at them for that), and Chelsie's conversation with Bob.

The twenty-years-later epilogue was interesting; that future seemed genuinely cool. I'm glad that Julius and Marci got to stay in Detroit; the future DFZ sounded amazing, and I loved that Julius got titles (Julius the Peacemaker suits him!) and that Marci got her Nobel (multiple Nobels!). And I wonder if Alicia Williams is going to be in the new trilogy?

There were a few loose ends—why did Svena have more babies than intended, and why are their eyes the wrong color? with how seer powers have been established to work, will Bob really never use his again? is Ross the crocodile shaman alive or not?—but this one pulled an astonishingly happy ending off, and I'm pleased with it.