rather than climactic finale, a terrible mishmash
348049
The only reason I got through this awful book was that I wanted to see what would happen.  In this novel, Benford himself seems exhausted or lazy and wants to bring the series to a close.  Rather than a story, he has ideas that he wants to push to their ultimate conclusion.  His physics were impossible for me to follow, poorly written, and embedded in a ridiculous plot.  Nigel Walmsley is back and on a mission, meandering though the weird place the humans have wound up, in and out of time, chased by a "grey mech" and heading inexorably to fulfill his destiny.  All of the plotlines of the sprawling series are supposed to come together and it simply doesn't work - instead, I as a reader plodded through it to get to the end, believing none of it whatsoever, and indeed getting turned off to trying anything that Benford would write ever again.

In other words, the book is an incomprehensible bore.  The editor did not do his job, which is to push the author to do better.  What I would recommend to readers it that they stop at book 3 of the series as the last 3 volumes are failures of ever declining quality.  I never lost the sense in any of the last 3 that Benford was just making it all up:  there was no magical world to enter and believe at least for the time you were reading, but just a lot of convoluted nonsense.
4682965
Year of Wonders grips the reader in from its first page.  This work opens the world of the seventeenth century to the reader and allows one to experience the horror, the fright, and the superstition that wreaked havoc across the plague ridden areas of Darbyshire England.  The characters, to begin with, are intriguing.  HOWEVER - The work suffers the most horrific anti-climax of almost any work that I have read.  The story completely unravels at the end as the main characters make decisions that are completely out of keeping with the philosophies and the mindset of the seventeenth century.  The ending of this book is not shocking, nor a bold twist in the tale - it is a pathetic conclusion that is so poor in its creativity that it diminishes the story that began so well earlier in the book.  If you want an enjoyable read of this time period, I would reccommend that you real Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver.
1540041
Interesting twist at the end of the book but poorly presented
311231
In one of history's great letdowns, "The Man From UNCLE" series ended with this two-part depressant.  It seemed as though the entire crew and cast of UNCLE simply gave up before this episode was even filmed.
First, the plot is ridiculous:  a former UNCLE agent decides to create a cultish sect, headquarter it in the Himalayas, and, together with six other intellectual "wonders of the world", blanket the planet with a docility gas, through which these seven can control the actions of everyone.  Why did UNCLE even bother getting involved?  Because the villain slips through the plot holes, thereby coming very close to pulling off his dastardly plan.
Horrible acting abounds, especially from the auxiliary cast.  There isn't enough material in the story to justify a two-part episode.  The teaser to "Part I" is enough to drive one into the bathroom.  Through nauseating use of the wide-angle lens, the wife of the wayward UNCLE agent rescues a THRUSH agent hopelessly trapped in the upper level of a mansion.  Not only do the wife and THRUSH agent escape, but Solo and Kuryakin's car is destroyed by a remote-controlled, window-mounted missile launcher in the mansion.  Please.
Because this is the final UNCLE episode, "Seven Wonders" falls into the fourth season of the series, during which drastic facelifts were applied to the series.  In the hands of Season Four producer Anthony Spinner, UNCLE, which had previously enjoyed wacky antics akin to "Get Smart".  Spinner wanted no part of this, and threw UNCLE in the cold storage room to harden it up for the fourth and suicidally-final season.  Humor was basically excommunicated for the season, and it kicks off right away with "The Summit-Five Affair" (a man's brain is destroyed during the teaser).  By the time "Seven Wonders" rolled around, this formula was well-absorbed into the UNCLE schema.  Plot and dialogue, therefore, really don't matter in these episodes.  The morbid music, combined with desolate scenes of a weary, bombed-out Solo staggering through the Himalayas, only to be apprehended by THRUSH and sentenced to death; and the final scene, during which (here come the spoilers....oops, too late) the coffin of the wayward UNCLE agent is loaded onto a plane, thus ending the episode, and, sadly, the series.
"Seven Wonders" is an important UNCLE episode, if for no other reason than because it is the last one, but it leaves a sour, depressed, disheartened taste in the mouth.  Buy at your own risk.
406912
Worst ending to a solid series ever. Talk about non-eventful.
1134635
It started well but went on to a predictable end with too many parts coming together in a contrived finale.
3645528
This is spoiler-ish as it refers to the ending.  Stop here if you don't want to know anything about it.
This book is well-written and entertaining, but when I got near the end I wanted to fling it across the room.  The ending is a betrayal of the romantic comedy genre and of the pact with the reader.  I hope they change it for the film version starring Anne Hathaway.  The fastest way to kill a movie's box office is to botch the ending.
4199591
The seventh installment of the Harry Potter series left me feeling high and dry at a time I felt I should have been celebrating. It was the end of an era! My defining childhood literature! And yet Rowling's attempt to bundle her created world into one neat little parcel failed miserably.

Without giving any specifics, I felt that the deviation from Hogwarts did not suit the characters at all. Their 'journey' fell flat in my eyes - a cowardly tactic despite the devastation in the world surrounding. The unbridled skewering of characters left and right seemed reminiscent of a B-grade horror film. A hundred pages in I was afraid Voldemort would be left by the sidelines in favor of much more controllable zombie armies to finish off all of the light side.

Any romance attempting to develop during the story line is utterly lost in the constant movement and action, which turned more boring then battle intense by the end of the novel. The final battle is overly dramatic and missing some vital characteristic that I am still unaware of. And can anyone say hero complex?

But beside all that, I believe the most horrible part of the ending to this generations defining series is the Epilogue. Not only does it attempt to give the next twenty years' worth of history in less than twenty pages, but it was uncalled for. What happened to letting the reader decide what happens? Who needs a pretty bow telling you that so-and-so lived happily ever after with fifteen kids, the end? J.K. Rowling, borrowing one of her favorite lines, completely bulloxed the ending with a few words too many.

In conclusion, steer clear of this book. The only thing that lies here is eight hours of pure disappointment.
4347795
I will echo what a number of the more tepid reviews note about this book.  For it being the technical end of a seven book series (Homeward Bound being more of an epilogue), it's a rather disappointing conclusion.  If you're looking for nicely tied up storylines, you will be upset with this book.  If you're okay with most of the plots being written with a more realistic idea that this is just a small portion of lives that keep going after the end of the book, you might be okay with it.

Ultimately, I found a number of critical flaws.  For starters, almost everyone speaks in the same tone, with the same phrases.  Everyone says "just so", regardless if they're American, Russian, or Lizard.  Also, most if not all of the human females stick out their tongues at least a few times to express playful annoyance.  Maybe I don't hang out with the same women as Mr. Turtledove, but rarely if ever have I seen an adult woman do that.  You also never need to remember any previous character history, as the author gives you the same mini-bio every time you return to them.  I started skipping entire paragraphs, as once again, we were reminded that Mordechai Anielewicz suffered nerve damage from the events in the climax of the Worldwar books.

In the end, there were just too many insignificant plots.  [minor spoilers] The previous series had a global war to keep everything tense.  Here, the major conflict already happened in a previous book.  The major secret that one character holds is completely obvious to the reader.  We have a Jewish Brit who makes popular gadgets of no real consequence.  A French woman, used and abused by everyone getting a job.  A couple ginger smugglers who bounce around the world to interact with other characters of little importance.  A Jewish family living a somewhat normal life.  So many pages dedicated to plots that just... are.  International crises aren't diffused because of them.  The world isn't saved due to them.  They're filler.  And when someone is detained, it's always just a matter of time before someone pulls strings to have them released.  Doesn't matter if it's high treason, international drug ring, or major revolutionary leader.  Someone knows someone else, and person goes free and immediately goes back to whatever got them in trouble to begin with.

The most criminal failure of this book, and as a result, the whole Colonization series, is that what passes as the climax is just a pale retread of the climax of the Worldwar series.  Literally with the same plot device and one of the same characters.  Yet fittingly, rather than a tense action sequence finish, it's again, literally a fizzle.  Like Turtledove wanted to give a giant middle finger to the readers who stuck with him through seven books, looking for a huge payoff.  In the end, the answer to what happens in a world 20 years after a partially successful alien invasion is, not much.
3897918
The film goes along well until the moments of revelation and reveal, and then the plot becomes contrived - it's a bit incredulous that the characters that loathe each other so much would suddenly fall so quickly and willingly into each other's arms and hearts.

The fault is not the actors', it's the script
3757547
When you think of the coast of Florida, one thing comes to mind: hurricanes. Well, also cockroaches, swamps and old people, but hurricanes are in the top five.

But the storms are unnaturally strong in the eighth volume of the Weather Warden series, "Cape Storm." And Rachel Caine's penultimate Weather Warden novel takes a dramatically dark turn with plenty of fatalities, some shocking twists and a trip to the dark side for her weather-warping heroine. Its a good climax to the series, and Caine literally keeps the plot twisting like a waterspout right to the end.

Joanne Baldwin has just sort-of-married her Djinn lover David, but they aren't getting a nice normal honeymoon -- a deadly storm is forming off of Florida. So the Weather Wardens and the Djinn end up taking over a vast luxury liner and heading out to sea (along with whiny celebrities and rich jerks who refused to get off the boat). Then they find a Djinn whose existence has been erased -- meaning the malignant Bad Bob is involved.

Of course, Bad Bob is stirring up the storm with antimatter, turning it into a potentially universe-destroying maelstrom that threatens to destroy them all. Also, the ship has some "skin"-wearing creatures that can erase Djinn. Worst of all, Joanne's demon mark is breaking loose of its constraints and swamping her true personality -- and even Lewis and David may not be able to save her.

Killer crystal skeletons, demonic storms, luxurious cruise liners filled with powerful Wardens and an evil tattoo -- I have to admit, Rachel Caine can manage some pretty interesting ideas. And the first chapters of "Cape Storm" are fairly lighthearted (including Celine Dion jokes -- "my heart would not go on, not if this voyage went badly"), but with some lurking flickers of darkness.

But it doesn't take long for Caine's story to blaze with black fire, especially when Jo is overwhelmed with her magical tattoo, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get rid of it. It's made all the more breathlessly horrible because of Caine's vivid writing ("the approaching black arms of the hurricane sweeping in like scythes") and warped sense of humor, which becomes downright twisted as Jo suddenly turns into a sneering, sniping, skanky monster. And it's even worse because the story is in first-person narrative.

And expect quite a few shocking changes in this book, especially for Jo and David. While some of these changes are merely entertaining (they get properly married on a pirate ship by the randy captain), others will have sweeping effects in the next book. BIIIIG effects.

Jo herself manages to maintain a fun sense of humor despite the ups and downs of her life (and her dubious fashion sense), but Caine succeeds in making her SCARY during the middle of the book, where her conscience gets switched off and she starts feeding off aggression and fear. And her constant battle against her mark -- even to the point of swimming in shark-infested waters -- is a powerful and seemingly doomed one.

David remains her deliciously sexy, adorably devoted Djinn lover, and Cherise serves as the snappy-tongued, clever blonde sidekick.  And poor Lewis is forced to take some terrible actions to protect the world from Bad Bob and Jo, including a psychic "kill switch." The one downside is that it seems rather contrived when Lewis' thoughts on Jo are revealed.

"Cape Storm" is a sometimes shocking, intensely written urban fantasy, with plenty of plot twists and a heroine who gets more than her fair share of horrible wounds. An excellent next-to-last book.
2496851
Donna Tartt has a solid grasp of the English language, but she doesn't have the faintest clue as to what she should do with it.  Certainly not waste any of it on developing trifles such as relationships, characters,  pacing or plot. A 280-page (AT MOST) book was thrown on her personal rack  and revamped as a weighty tome guaranteed to cure insomnia.  It had  absolutley nothing to do over the course of the last third before she wraps  up the project in an utterly absurd "climax."  The icing on the  cake, however, comes in the epilogue: Tartt cobbles together a wrap-up that  seems to have roots in the "crawls" that appear at the end of an  awful TV movie of the week.  There is probably a very good reason that she  hasn't done anything since: she is completely inept when it comes to  storytelling.
4354481
I couldn't agree more with the reviewers who complain about the unsatisfactory conclusion of this novel.

Robert and Eddi are compelling characters and Brooks' ability to write a taut thriller is laudable, but the novel as a whole seems to consist of two poorly knit genres.  Readers gallop through 322 pages (at least in my edition) of adventure and intrique then conclude with a single page of existential posturing. While we may all have to learn to live life with mysteries unsolved and fuzzy definitions of identity--like the book's protagonist, it probably isn't why most of us read tales of danger and suspense.

Perhaps Brooks is brave to experiment with such a wide open conclusion in this novel, but I don't think the venture succeeded.
1385875
The climax is in the last 40 pages. If you're a social justice warrior idiot, then this is the book for you. Such a terrible ending. This is a book about a big company taking over control of the world in a sense and making it become more like a socialist society. I only read it to hope that at the end of the book, it would turn out right. So disappointed. The author also likes to use big words and made a geographical error (he put that Arizona and New Mexico were in the southeastern part of the US).
280683
"Saw III" should have been the epic, horrifying end to this demented series; unfortunately, it wasn't epic and it probably isn't the end of the series at all.

The reason I enjoyed the first film was not the gore, although I have to admit I was impressed by the openly brutal scenario of people having to hack their own legs off in order to survive (one either overcomes the fear of horrendous physical pain or dies), but because it had a soul and a brain behind it: an atmosphere of mystery and horror pervaded it.  No one knew who was the vicious mastermind behind these inventive and repugnant torture/murders or who would go to such lengths to prove something to society about the depreciation of life. Saw II" carried on in a similar vein; more was revealed about Jigsaw and he was face to face with an angry cop who wanted his son back.  Still, we didn't know anything about him and it never became too personal; he remained a ghastly enigma with an intriguingly intelligent and thoroughly evil persona.

In this movie, though, they make the character that could have rivalled Hannibal Lecter into a soap opera.  The film begins promisingly (an ex-con gets permanently reformed in a rather unorthodox way) and Jigsaw, ironically, has to face his own mortality through his imminent death by cancer.  From there it degenerates into tedious emotional dynamics involving his protege Amanda, a young doctor with a time operated shotgun shell collar around her neck, and plays an extended and really ridiculous "game" with a blameless victim of a drunk driver.

The character Jeff and his "vengeance conflict" (how can you blame the guy for not wanting to save the guy who ran over his child?) is really just an excuse for us to watch Jigsaw's demented assistant indulge in emotional drama about her checkered and boring past.  Things get so monotonous that nothing shocks anymore.  The end is the most ridiculous plot twist I've ever seen and it isn't enduring what precedes it.  If they were going to do this, they should have ended the series with the original.
1694799
It does raise more questions than it answers.  Maguire may have seen this as a metaphor for life -- that no one ever knows how life turns out because it just keeps going after each of us is gone -- but don't we want more from fiction?  I do.  I don't need a happy ending.  But I *do* need an ending.

This book was also terribly uneven.  At times it's tediously talky with nothing going on.  The characters are all irritating (with the possible exception of Glinda, a somehow charmingly self-centered and resourceful individual, and sorely missed when the narrative turned its back on her).  Maguire didn't give me enough to care about.  Then he did.  Then he took it away again.  But I kept going, because I looked forward to how this was all going to be resolved.

Maguire has a wonderful way with words, but he either used too many or too few in this book.  He may have felt he did justice to his subject, but I don't think he did justice to his readers.  And towards the end, I often felt I didn't understand *what* he was getting at, because he just never quite got there.

All in all, I felt Maguire didn't want to end the series, for whatever reason.  Feh.
4227099
After five three-hour films, thirteen years, hundreds of millions of dollars spent and earned, seventeen Academy Awards, and thousands of miles traversed on-screen, director Peter Jackson's iconic, J. R. R. Tolkien-derived Middle-earth saga comes to a decidedly uneven end with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third and final prequel to The Lord of the Rings.  There is no way around the truth, cold and hard as it is:  this is the worst of the six films.  In fact, as a fan (though not a particularly ardent one), it is the only entry in the series I do not rate as a satisfying picture.  So much goes wrong.  One flaw is predictable:  to the give the second film, The Desolation of Smaug, a grim, dramatic, and abrupt to-be-continued ending, the start of this film was sacrificed a year ago.  So, it begins.  Infuriated dragon Smaug is laying waste to a town of men.  We as an audience are disconnected, disoriented.  The dragon dies and becomes an almost instant afterthought.  The desolation of Smaug is over.  Shrug.  Also becoming an afterthought here, sadly, is title character Bilbo Baggins, Shire-born master burglar.  The wonderful Martin Freeman is still a charismatic, grounded, slightly mischievous, and ultimately noble presence in the role, but he is often crowded to the edge of the frame and the story.  The Hobbit now has to remind itself to include the hobbit.

In his stead are vast, brutal, ambitious, and interminable sequences of combat:  elf versus dwarf, dwarf versus goblin, man versus orc, and so on and so forth times infinity.  It becomes an exhausting spectacle, and moments of genuine excitement and ferocity are too infrequent.  The limited scope is also dispiriting.  The armies fight outside the Lonely Mountain.  They fight in the town a mile from the Lonely Mountain.  They fight on a glacier a mile from the town near the Lonely Mountain.  There is the dampening sense here of a film racing and screaming and starting fires, but never moving anywhere particularly fast despite the outward pomp and instances of indulgent fan service, including absurd, please-cheer displays of aerobatic daring by Orlando Bloom's returning Legolas, no longer as sexy and dynamic as he used to be.  The film is also curiously disinterested in resolving certain subplots (despite a scenery-devouring cameo by Cate Blanchett, the confirmation of Sauron's impending return to power plays more as a rushed obligation than a foreboding revelation) or saying a proper farewell to a catalog of characters unique to the prequels, such as barely-glimpsed shape-shifter Beorn.