I guess you could call this the finale of the first arc, despite this technically being one big ongoing series? Or at least a mid-series finale. Either way, I'm excited to delve into this semi-conclusion of the first part of the series. Spoilers ahead.
Now united, the sisters and their father the King have only one mission: to stop the Prince Without a Name from using the complete song to awake his father, the evil King, which would no doubt spell the end of Fantasia and especially our royal family. They travel underground to an ancient castle in the middle of the sea: the only part of Fantasia where magic still truly works. Here, they go and confront their adversary, with all the risks this entails.
A good conclusion to the series. While I don't like this one quite as much as my favorite books from the series such as The Forest Princess or The Princess of Darkness, it's still a neat conclusion and once again this is a book that breaks the familiar pattern the first few books set up, which got old really quick.
The stakes here do truly feel higher than ever before and it's executed well for the most part. We get a few exciting confrontations with the Prince Without a Name (who I really shouldn't have been calling Herbert anymore in my previous reviews in hindsight, oops), but the journey to get to the castle is equally mysterious and thrilling at times, with there being many obstacles along the way.
It's also neat to finally get to see the sisters and their father (and later mother) get together here and interact with one another as a unit for the first time. Before there were definitely interactions between some of the sisters or Gunnar or "Helgi", but they were mostly just with two to three characters in a scene, with the family still being mostly split up. This book at last unites them all and it's just neat and wholesome to see how everyone plays off of one another. The girls have been without their parents for years now, so to finally see them get their father and later also mother back is just very heartwarming especially with the implication they thought at least their mother to be dead, though I don't think this is ever outright stated in the text.
The final confrontation was also pretty intense and I'm glad the conflict with the Prince Without a Name has (at least for now) came to a close. I do by now realize I honestly wanted to know a little bit more about him as a character before he was magically put to sleep like his father, because even after six books what we know about him only scratches the surface. We know he was the son of the old king who managed to evade the sleeping spell, has no name, uses disguises and blue bugs for evil purposes, and wants revenge.
This is an interesting concept for a character to be sure, but so far he's been pretty much nothing but a one-dimensional villain and most times we see him we don't even see the "true" Prince Without a Name because he's nearly constantly donning a disguise or using others (e.g. Calengol, Rubin Blue) to do his bidding for him. So it feels like a bit of missed potential to not have explored him as a character more especially now that he's (at least temporarily) defeated. There's of course still the potential to do this in future books as the series does continue after this book, but since this feels very much like a mid-series finale (with the ending having most loose ends tied up, safe for a few) and the Prince Without a Name was our primary villain here it'd have been nicer to have explored him, the real him, a bit more.
Something I did like, albeit very briefly: Calengol (somehow?) survived the ordeal from the last book despite it being very heavily implied he died there (it said something along the lines of "he breathed out his last breath", but I guess it wasn't his last after all) and is now finally forgiven by the royals and allowed to stay in Diamante's kingdom. It's a brief scene, but I'm glad we at least got some more slightly positive closure for his character after all the awful things he went through before.
The ending of the story is a pretty predictable one, but I don't mind happy endings even if they're a bit cliché. Sure, the whole power of love saving everything and it ending with a final royal dance and the confirmation of a few more marriages is a bit predictable, but it's also nice to just see these royals being happy as a family after having been apart for ages. I also do not mind Diamante finally forgiving Rubin Blue here and agreeing to marry him, because like I said in my last review my main gripe with that scene in book five is that it simply went too fast. In this book, Diamante ponders more carefully if she truly forgives and loves Rubin Blue back. So I'm glad she was allowed to ruminate on it more.
So yeah, not the best of the series in my opinion. It's a neat book, but I'd be lying if I said I was as into it as the past two books. Though it is neat to get to the final confrontation and finally see the family get together. I'll eventually move on to reviewing the second half of the series, but for now I'm glad to have finished up the first half.
Rating: 4/5
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