Thursday, February 28, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Demon's Surrender by Sarah Rees Brennan



The Demon's Surrender is the conclusion of the trilogy began by Sarah Rees Brennan in The Demon's Lexicon and continued in The Demon's Covenant.  I really enjoyed The Demon's Covenant when I got to it earlier this year, so while I waited about a year between going from the first book and the second, it only took me about a month to finish the series with this book.  Note that while in theory you could've started this series with the 2nd book, you really can't start with this book, as it deals with and wraps up plot hooks left open by the prior two books as a major part of its narrative.

As a trilogy-ender, The Demon's Surrender generally works, although it doesn't live up to its predecessor (it falls in the middle of the three books for me).  The characters for the most part remain excellent, and Brennan is phenomenal at witty dialogue and that totally continues here.  And the plot maintains a pretty strong pace with unpredictable moments here and there, with its new lead character (Sin, who was a side character previously) generally working....although not completely (I didn't quite buy the main romance honestly).

In short, I'm glad I read and finished this trilogy and will be back for more of SRB's works, but this isn't as clearly a winner as its predecessor.

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Sin has always considered the Goblin Market her true home, and has always taken the support of its leader, Merris, for granted.  But now, Merris has declared that the next leader of the Market won't necessarily be Sin, but that Sin will have to compete to prove her worthiness against upstart Mae Crawford.  And despite the fact that Mae is essentially an outsider, it seems like everything is in Mae's favor - leaving Sin unsure of what to do.  And it isn't helped by the fact that Sin is carrying a family secret, one which threatens to estrange her from the Market if she is ever found out.

But when Merris asks Mae and Sin to steal a pearl from the leader of the Aventurine Circle - the deadly magicians who last tussled with the Market, with the prize being the leadership position, Sin is forced to work alongside Alan and Nick Ryves, with whom she has always had a complicated relationship - Nick, because of his demon nature, and Alan, who everyone else used to like but Sin always found annoying.  But it was Alan who sacrificed himself to save Sin's brother from the Magicians, and Sin knows she is in his debt...and as she begins to try to work with him more, she finds herself finding a side of him she never realized existed.

But Alan's sacrifice has left him vulnerable to the Magician's whims, and has left Nick in the potential control of the Magicians....and the end result could be utterly disastrous not just for Sin, but the entire market, as the Magicians gain a hold on Nick's great power and the terror they could unleash.  It will take Sin finding some way to possibly solve the situation in order to save not just Alan, but everyone and everything she cares about....
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The Demon's Surrender switches the point of view of the story again, this time to Cynthia "Sin" Davies (a minor character in the first book and a small but important character in the second book), but is basically continuing the story from The Demon's Covenant.  As such, this is still the story of Alan, Nick, Mae, and Jamie trying to deal with the power-hungry agendas of the evil Magicians, with Sin now roped in as the market is caught in the crossfire (and Sin is now being pressed into a competition with Mae, our prior point of view character).  And for the most part, the story still works really well.

Sin's addition to this series' lead cast works generally pretty well for the most part- we knew a little of Sin's past from the prior novels, but we learn more here and it works to make her a more well rounded character...although the reveal that Sin, like the other characters, lives a double life and attends a normal high school felt kind of weird given what we knew of her.  But it's easy to see why Sin does what she does and how she reacts, and while she's not as resourceful as Mae or as deadly as our prior heroine, she's still solid to root for.

The rest of our cast still work really well, even when we only get small glimpses of them at times (which is the case for Jamie in particular).  They've all developed over the prior two books quite a bit, and seeing how that's happened.  And I love them, and Brennan still writes them excellently - Alan, nerdy but manipulative; Nick, powerful yet unsure of what his emotions mean; Mae, intelligent and quick thinking but wanting honesty from those she loves (we don't see her insecurity as clearly without her point of view, but it's clearly still there), etc.

As for the plot, it generally works pretty damn well, with it naturally leading from the cliffhangers at the end of the last book to a conclusion which makes sense and puts all of the conflicts of this trilogy to bed.  It's not often unpredictable, but enough of it is to keep the reader guessing, which works just well enough - and the dialogue of the trilogy remains absolutely a gem, with there being oh so many goddamn quotable lines in the story.

But the reason this book didn't land quite as well for me as its predecessor is that while I liked Sin, she's clearly the worst of the trilogy's lead characters.  A major part of this plot is a romance between her and Alan, and well....it didn't really make sense to me anymore than it did for Alan at the start of this book, and I wasn't sold on it.  Moreover, this is the third consecutive book in the series where the climax is resolved by actions pulled off by other characters than the lead heroine (not Alan this time!), and that got a little grating - especially as Sin probably played the smallest role in resolving the conflict in her own book compared to the prior two leads....it made it seem like the shift in POV happened just to be a thing the book wanted to do, rather than happening for any real purpose.

In short, The Demon's Covenant remains by far my favorite of this series, although I'd probably rank this book above The Demon's Lexicon. And the amazing dialogue of Brennan alone makes this book worth reading after the other two.  But it's a minor step down, so be warned.


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