It took me over a year or three, but I've finally read the last Seekers book! And no, I'm not planning on covering the graphic novels. Let's see. Spoilers ahead.
Toklo, Lusa, Kallik and Yakone have arrived at Great Bear Lake for the yearly meeting again, however trouble arises when it turns out all the old leaders have died, leading to chaos among the bear species. Not only that, but some old enemies have also tracked down our heroes to the meeting and are set on revenge.
It's...eh, not bad. Not good, either. I feel overall very lukewarm over most of the Seekers books and this one is no exception. I will give it credit for this book finally not being a traveling book anymore, and I do like some of the characters and interactions, but it's still not very good.
First of all, there's way too many characters introduced in this book in rapid fire succession, and they do too little to really leave an impact. Among all these brown, white and black bears there is literally a handful where I could only remember which character is which. The rest was just background character clutter. They definitely should've had either less characters, or have the named characters make more of an impact and introduced them in a less speedy way.
Secondly, I don't like how Lusa's rather sporadic romance developed. Seekers has never been exactly great at writing romance, but at least Yakone and Kallik and Toklo and Aiyanna feel somewhat like believable couples and like they are genuinely interested in one another. Lusa meanwhile in these twelve books never once showed any interest in being in a relationship or having cubs, it's just not something that really occurred to her throughout the story. So to suddenly shove her into yet another hetero romance in the last third of this book felt beyond forced. Couldn't she just have stayed single? Was that really so much of a problem? It's just annoying and feels like it comes right the fuck out of nowhere.
The recurring antagonists of Hakan and Nanulak returning was definitely one of the more interesting plot points, and I do like how they handled Hakan. He doesn't outright get redeemed, but it is shown that his main motivation for his bad actions is grief and that is treated well in the story. So I like that they added more nuance to his character.
The same couldn't be said for Nanulak, however. I've already talked about how I felt about this character in my prior review of Island of Shadows, and they made him no better in this appearance here. He's still irredeemable, he's still an asshole, there's still no nuance to his character. He just shows up to fight Toklo and dies. What a disappointing sendoff for this character, honestly I'd rather they hadn't had him pop up again because what does this even add to his character as a whole other than a death? Nothing. They had the opportunity here to do something with him similar to Hakan, to at least show more of him or give him some depth. But nope, his entire shtick is still the same and then he dies before we get any interesting development of him. What a shame.
Overall this isn't one of the worst books in the series or anything, but it felt mostly dull. A lot of the conflict in this is interpersonal conflict between all these characters I couldn't keep track of and thus care about. There is the tearful goodbye at the end and I do still like some characters and other aspects like the handling of Hakan and some interactions, but that still doesn't make this a great installment.
I am glad I finally finished both arcs of this series, but I likely will not be re-reading them. They are too dull, recycle too many of the same conflicts, and there are simply too many traveling books. I do love the characters of Lusa and Toklo and they're by far my favorite aspect of the series, but it doesn't save Seekers for me ultimately.
Rating: 3/5
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