The Last Star by Rick Yancey

Summary from Goodreads:

The enemy is Other. The enemy is us.

They’re down here, they’re up there, they’re nowhere. They want the Earth, they want us to have it. They came to wipe us out, they came to save us.

But beneath these riddles lies one truth: Cassie has been betrayed. So has Ringer. Zombie. Nugget. And all 7.5 billion people who used to live on our planet. Betrayed first by the Others, and now by ourselves.

In these last days, Earth’s remaining survivors will need to decide what’s more important: saving themselves…or saving what makes us human.

Review:

I sort of had a love/hate relationship with this book. I think overall, I ended up loving it more than hating it. I certainly enjoyed it a lot more than book 2. I loved the first book, but I found the second book kind of confusing and all over the place. This final one felt a lot more linear. However, it was the first time I listened to it on audio, so that could be it as well. I know one of my issues with book 2 was remembering which point of view I was in. This is much easier with both a male and a female narrator.

I wish I actually listened to all the installments. I think this would have resolved a lot of issues for me. It doesn’t hurt that both narrators were fantastic, either. I loved Cassie’s voice. She was just enough annoying, and just enough sarcastic and cool.

As one would expect from the final installment of a series that’s all about the end of the world, this book was rather intense. More answers are given. I’m not sure they all make sense to me. Maybe they need to sit with me a little longer. But, at least they were there. The action in this one, particularly at the end, was nonstop. There wasn’t as much random side stories that centered on things that didn’t feel that important (like in book 2). Guess what? All those not-so-important-seeming side stories weren’t important…I really just don’t get a lot of book 2…

Any way, I really enjoyed the characters too. All the scenes with everyone in one house (in the very beginning) were awesome. I loved seeing Cassie and Ringer interact. I loved Zombie’s relationship with Nugget. I loved the weird, young family dynamic that was really just an end result of messed up circumstances. It reminded me a lot of the show, The Walking Dead, which from me, is a major compliment. The outside chaos is bad, but it’s the inner turnmoil and drama that steals the show.

So why a hate relationship at all? One of my biggest red flags in a book is whining. And there was a lot of whining here. I guess if this were a tv show, I wouldn’t have to read all the inner monologues about how awful the world has become. And I guess getting it from one character is okay. But from all the points of views? It was overkill.

And top that off with the author trying so hard to sound a certain way. Sometimes my biggest problem with adult fiction, is the author trying to sound so intelligent. Like you can use smaller words that would actually make more sense in people’s dialog…And I guess in this book, it just felt like Yancey was really trying to come across poetic and metaphorical. And again, I think this would be a lot more tolerable if it were one character who seemed this way. But all the characters? I don’t feel like they would all have the same level of understanding of events, or same level of poetic justice as every character at various ages and stages of development.

I guess my hate relationship lied in the overkill. There was overkill whining. And there was overkill metaphor. I loved the idea of the story. I loved the characters. I just wish the characters were a little more distinguishable. Like, they should not all be using poetic metaphors to describe their situations. They are all very different people. And I don’t think Ringer should make connections the same way Cassie does.

The ending was brave and kind of awesome. It was not what I was expecting and this made me like it a lot more. Not all of the alien stuff made sense to me, but a lot more of it made sense to me than it did before. All in all, I give it an 8/10.