Poe M.'s Reviews > Waverider

** spoiler alert ** • 2 stars - mostly for my love of the previous books
(This is my first written review so please bare with my scattered thoughts 🙏🏻)

I’ve been a huge fan of The Amulet series since I was 7. I’m 20 now, and these are my thoughts.

The last book feels like it ruins everything the series sets up. I did like parts of it, like the overall message of letting go of grief & forgiving yourself etc., but as a whole I feel like it was a let down of a final book, especially considering readers have waited 6 years for this book to come out.
It completely contradicts Ikol being a servant to the Shadows as previously established and instead introduces a bunch of inter-dimensional robot-like beings as Ikol’s ‘masters’, then attempts to explain it away by saying “oh, Silas made us all and he’s Silas so you can’t question it”. It also tries to explain Ikol as a technological program made by Silas, but why would Silas create a programs like Ikol? Assuming Ikol wasn’t always evil, why was he originally created anyway?
This also contradicts previous implications that Ikol has been continuing the cycle of war and peace (as explained by Virgil) for hundreds of years by controlling elven kings, as Silas is much too young to have created something that old.

Vigo’s death (??) comes out of absolute nowhere and his book that supposedly contains information that was so important he spent the rest of his life writing it plays absolutely no role in the story. It’s a useless plot point thrown randomly in at the end to make us think Vigo actually had an impact. This book has been sitting in Silas’s library for years and you’re telling me Leon, who scoured the whole room in book 3 looking for mentions of Cielis, didn’t find it and tell Emily about it (the first page in Vigo’s book specifies that it’s for Emily!! Leon is incredibly smart, he definitely would have brought up a book addressed to Emily from 300 years ago).

The earlier books also built up Trellis as ruler of the Elves, with a Zuko-esque ‘being better than my father’ arc, and Emily as a leader of the stone keepers, but book 9 dumps all that progress in the trash. It also slaps us with a “oh yeah also Riva had a prophetic vision about Trellis’s future where he has kids and also she’s his baby mom”?? In my personal opinion, that is a HORRIBLE direction for both of their characters. Trellis has so much pain and trauma, especially revolving around family, that he has never been given a chance to work through or process. There is no way that boy would just jump headfirst into fatherhood without some serious therapy and anxieties. And Riva?? The badass mayor searching for a new home for her people, a responsibility pushed upon her after the death of her father, is suddenly settling down and having babies without completing any of her actual goals? It’s such a disservice to her character and Trellis’s. Not to mention a missed opportunity to have them bond and work together as two leaders with extreme responsibilities trying to rebuild their communities after the war. Add in Emily and you’ve got a strong trifecta of young leaders working together to bring about a permanent era of peace.

Also, what about Navin? Absolutely nothing satisfying comes from his part of the story. Very early on it’s established that Navin is destined to be a resistance leader so important there were prophesies about him. In the end though he doesn’t really do all that much. He gets a few chances here and there to shine but he never gets anything that lives up to the hype others give him. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore Navin, but again Book 9 proves to be a huge disservice to its characters and its legacy. Navin plants a tree, tries to stand up to a possessed rebel leader but gets his ass handed to him, then gets possessed almost immediately and has to be saved by Emily.

We get introduced to the new guardian council (even though we’ve had a new one established since book 5?) and it’s so underwhelming it kills me. These secret all powerful children are introduced so quickly and are included so little that they have absolutely no depth to their characters. They struggle with virtually nothing (Wes has a moment during the weird gathering thing but the stakes are laughable) and go through no development. They’re just super strong and not at all flawed, except for Wes who’s different for added flavour, and are just immediately accepted as the new Guardian Council without any protest or discussion whatsoever. They face no pushback or dissent, but most importantly they have no experience and no one knows who they are?? If the theory of a 6 month time skip in between books are true, then the public had 2-2.5 years to get used to the old-new guardian council who they saw fighting the elf armies and actually resisting their oppressors. I don’t believe they’d be cool with four random kids, who have done absolutely nothing but build stuff in a secret cave, leading them as the most powerful leaders of the world.

Branching off of powerful kids, how did making Ikol small and blowing him away (he wasn’t even defeated in any real way) free Alledians from the mysterious animal curse? As far as we know, Ikol wasn’t connected to that curse in any way, nor does he have the power to inflict such a curse s on people, especially non-stonekeepers. So what happened there?

All in all, I feel like Book 9 creates way more loose ends than it ties up and is, unfortunately, the worst written book in the series. It has too many new ideas and plot points for a finale and brings them about in a contradictory and confusing way. 6 years feels like more than enough time to have been able to fix everything that went wrong in this book & to create a satisfying ending to such a beloved and long running series. It doesn’t feel like it was handled with the care and love so clearly put into the earliest books. The ending didn’t quite feel like an ending though, so I hope that at the very least, the possible sequel series will set things straight and pick up the ball that was dropped so hard in Book 9.