Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

by Brandon Sanderson

[inlibrisveritas]

Calamity is the third and final book in the Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson, and it ends with a bang!

I’m fairly awful at finishing series, so I ended up buddy reading this one with my boyfriend as it’s a series that I got him started on and it’s only fitting that he be the one that urges me to finish it. I think overall we were both simultaneously pleased and somewhat let down with this installment. We listened to this on audio and really can’t recommend it enough! This series is a delight to listen to and MacLeod Andrews is a genius at narration.

Calamity boasts answers and promises a final showdown, it provides both of those but in varying degrees. We do get the answers we wanted, like what Calamity is and how it works…but when it gets around to answering the ‘why’ part it gets hazy. I liked the overall reasoning behind Epics and their descent into power crazed madness but it’s a reason that requires a lot more page time than we ended up with. So we were both left somewhat frustrated at the whole set of new questions we had thanks to the ending. The showdown itself is pretty nice though. We get to see Prof lording about in all his glory as well as some new Epics who have some rather cool powers, and there is a ton of tension to keep the story moving a long even in the slower planning sections.

Sanderson is one of the kings of world building and it’s really no surprise that one of my favorite things about this book was the main setting of Ildithia, or Atlanta. A city made out of salt kind of sounds like hell, but just the way he describes it makes it seem so beautiful. The idea of a moving city is pretty freaking amazing as well.

As an ending, I think it does a nice job wrapping up everything that was laid out before us in the beginning, and it really comes full circle in some areas. The characters are still as awesome as they were in the beginning, and made me realize I’m going to sort of miss David’s awful metaphors. I’m super happy I was kind of pushed into reading this one and closing out the trilogy because despite some lingering questions it turned out to be a damn good read.