The final book in the first arc! Spoilers ahead.
The three Dragon Speakers must again re-unite in order to save the kingdom from the evil golden monkeys. Especially Brawnshanks, who has delusions of godhood now that he has one of the Speaker stones.
Overall I think this is a fine conclusion. It's not the best book in the series, but it is fairly well-done and I did like it. It does reach some high highs, especially with the kingdom slowly being destroyed by the supposedly-divine "Dragon Monkey" Brawnshanks.
However, this book is not without its criticisms. For one, I think Ghost should've gotten more spotlight. His POV chapters are missing in favor of a Shiver POV, and while I don't mind her addition to the main cast (I do love Shiver as a character), I still think Ghost should've been featured a bit heavier here. This is the final chapter in this story, yet most POV time is dedicated to Leaf, Rain and Shiver. When this is supposed to be the triplets' last hurrah before we go into arc 2 (which will with 99% certainty have different protagonists). So it feels a bit unbalanced to not feature Ghost as heavily.
I know earlier books in the series also sidelined Leaf and Rain for a bit, but at least those were mid-arc books. This is the final chapter in the story of the triplets and yet one of them barely gets to feature and feels more like a side character if anything. It just feels a bit unbalanced.
Also, I've kinda said this before, but I just don't think the monkeys are particularly effective antagonists. I personally always preferred Dusk's villainy and yeah, that still applies in this book. Especially since Brawnshanks seems to just completely turn into a loose cannon who has lost his mind by this book. And honestly I just didn't really like his character, not in the early books but especially not once he became a major villain. He just didn't really work for me, especially once he started to try to destroy the kingdom (like, you idiot, you're living in the kingdom. You're getting yourself and your own people killed!) and started believing he's a god.
Crookedclaw also briefly gets to shine as a villain here and while I like her more as an antagonist than Brawnshanks, she's still far from my favorite Erin Hunter villain. I do like her cunning and tricky attitude more than Brawnshanks' "look at me I am a god I will destroy the world" type of deal, but she's still not too great and she only really gets to feature as a main villain for a few chapters here before being defeated.
But there are also good things here. I do like what they did with Leaf and Rain, I liked Shiver's POV and her interactions with Nightwalker, I liked the inclusion of the gibbons, I liked the epic scale of the story and I also appreciate how none of the main characters were shoved into a poorly written romance by the end of the arc (something a lot of other Erin Hunter books do) .
So overall this is a pretty solid conclusion. I do just have the two major gripes of A) Ghost not being heavily featured and B) the monkey's being pretty weak villains in my opinion.
Rating: 3.5/5
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