About time I finished this trilogy. Spoilers ahead.
Now with the Stone Mole in their midst, the moles of the Stone are still at war with the evil cult of the Word and its ruthless leader, Lucerne. Beechen, our Stone Mole, may just be able to turn the tide in the moles of the Stone's favor.
Overall a solid conclusion to this series. I think I prefer this one slightly more than Duncton Quest, the second book in the series, though I don't quite like it as much as Duncton Wood. This installment definitely has some of the best aspects of the trilogy if you ask me. It still continues the trend of intricate world-building, harrowing scenes of mole war crimes and it has some amazingly written characters (especially Henbane gets her time to shine here, she is my favorite character of the trilogy now).
But for what it does right, it also has a few downsides. This book still has a bit of the bloat issue I also found in book two, where it feels like scenes could've been shortened or cut because the pace got really slow. There's also a lot of passages which are basically just moles talking about the Stone and faith and it does get stale after a while.
In this third installment we also really get it hammered home by the author how much the Stone faith is inspired by Christianity. Which while I personally don't mind it too much (heck I consider myself a Christian), I think I'd have preferred it if Horwood was a bit more original and subtle and went his own way with it. Like, Beechen's death being so reminiscent of Christ's crucifixion just made it so on-the-nose obvious that we were basically witnessing Mole Christianity that it lost all subtlety (not to say it was super subtle before). Since this is a fantasy about moles, I think I'd have preferred it if the Stone faith was its own thing. It definitely has non-Christian influences in it as well, but by books two and three it becomes increasingly obvious just how much influence Horwood drew from said religion. Not an inherently bad thing to me, but I'd have preferred a different, less on-the-nose execution and I can see why it might put some people off.
Overall this is still a very strong conclusion to the series though and I had a blast reading it. It also caused me a lot of emotional turmoil (/pos) as Horwood kept killing off character after character which I cared about.
Now, for future Horwood reviews, I do currently own the entire sequel trilogy, The Book of Silence, so I have plans for reading and reviewing those eventually. But first I'll take a little break from this universe, I don't know exactly for how long.
Rating: 4/5
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