The final book of the trilogy! Let's dive in. You know what to expect by now, probably. Spoilers ahead.
After our main cast arrives at the seemingly save haven for humans, Mhumhi and his family quickly realize that it's a bust, and instead seek shelter in a garbage dump near the ocean. From here on family conflict rises as Mhumhi must figure out where his loyalties truly lie and what to do next.
I praised the first two books, a lot. I still consider thisone decent. But it just...kind of feels like an unsatisfying conclusion.
First things first: the tone. The first books in this series were already bleak and dark, but by god this book really ups it one more time. Maha, the girl Mhumhi grew really close to, is dead. New friends Mini and Sekayi both die gruesome deaths. Tareq is neglected at some points by both Mhumhi and Kutta. There's endless conversations about what is the right thing to do, what people should and shouldn't be hunting and eating... And most devastating of all, Mhumhi and his remaining sister Kutta grow apart.
Like, I get that these books want to be bleak, but this was honestly just too depressing for me. Like, books can make me feel depressed and still want to keep reading. But this just made me want to put the book down regularly because I wasn't engaged anymore. I knew everything was bleak as all hell, and aside from the first ten chapters or so no new interesting concepts are introduced and it's pretty much just our characters dicking around at the dump and having interpersonal conflicts.
The garbage dump, too, was a problem for me. The first and second books all had these interesting locations such as the city, the underground city, the desert and even in the first third of this book the save haven. But after that pretty much the entire book is spent at the trash site which was just a dull setting I didn't give a shit about. I kept waiting for our characters to move on, since they pretty much moved from location to location in earlier books, but they stick around until the very end. So that's a lot of chapters spent at the dump.
Maybe this is just a personal taste. I can handle dark stuff, definitely. Otherwise I wouldn't have gotten through books one and two. But this is just too bleak with too little variation and moments of relief. It made everything feel dull and uninteresting. There is a slightly positive epilogue/final chapter, but it's so brief after all this hellish dreariness of the rest of the book that it's too little too late.
As for our characters...boy do they go through development. Mhumhi becomes a true killer by now, even killing a former friend of his. He starts to grow disillusioned with everything (including his own family) and (somehow) close to Hlolwa. Kutta even partially neglects Tareq for a bit, and of course there's the rift that starts to exist between her and Mhumhi which was just so depressing to read about. All throughout the series these two have been very close despite all the odds, but now their sibling-bond is torn apart over just a few conflicts like it never meant anything to begin with.
I get Mhumhi starting to lose his care about Tareq. He never was close to the boy in the first place; he only really bonded with Maha out of his two human siblings. But him and Kutta always had eachother's backs, even after Sacha and Maha died and Kebero turned against them. But now it seems like relatively little conflict just splits them up like that.
For the unlikable elephants in the room: Hlolwa and Bii. I disliked these characters in the other books. I especially disliked them here, most notably Hlolwa. Bii was still present, but his role was luckily rather minor. When Hlolwa appeared in this book, I really hoped her role would be small as well, but unfortunately she has been upgraded to major character in this book, with Mhumhi spending most of his time with her in favor of his real family. Honestly, while I dislike the rift that came to be, I still at least understand where Kutta's coming from with Mhumhi spending so much time with Hlolwa in favor of her and Tareq.
Hlolwa is just such an unpleasant character and the fact that she was in this book so much is just another reason for me wanting to put it down sometimes. Mhumhi seems to have convinced himself by the end that she's a good person (er...dog), but honestly I don't understand his reasoning. One of his reasonings is that if she wanted to, she could've killed Sekayi. So what? She still attacked him and his wounds could've gotten infected and he would've died anyways. Her holding back doesn't make her a good person all of a sudden. She does do some "good" with Tareq, but that doesn't in any way make up for the years of terror she caused in the city and how her troops killed all the bouda.
The only characters I still really liked in this book were Vimbo, Mini and Sekayi, out of which the latter two die a most brutal death, so that's not exactly great, either. So in the character department it made me dislike quite a bit of the cast and one character I already loathed became a major player. Vimbo is still a rather interesting character, however, because while he never says an actual word (except for some he writes, but this is very few) you can still clearly see him develop and grow bonds with characters. But aside from him there really weren't any character moments I really liked here.
I'm just overall not a big fan of this book. It's decent, but it's too heavy-handed, the majority of characters become unlikable and the book just kind of stops being interesting after they leave the safe place. So unfortunately the trilogy doesn't have a very strong conclusion.
The book also ends with a sneak peak for a prequel novel called Speak, Dog, however I can't find any updates on it and it's not available for purchase anywhere that I can tell. Since this book was published in 2015, I feel this prequel may just never come to be, but never say never.
Rating: 3/5
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