Title: The Crown
Author: Kiera Cass
Publisher/Year:  Harper Collins 5/3/16
Length:   212 pages
Series:  The Selection #5

Overview

Kiera Cass’s #1 New York Times bestselling Selection series has captured the hearts of readers from its very first page. Now the end of the journey is here. Prepare to be swept off your feet byThe Crown—the eagerly awaited, wonderfully romantic fifth and final book in the Selection series.

In The Heir, a new era dawned in the world of The Selection. Twenty years have passed since America Singer and Prince Maxon fell in love, and their daughter is the first princess to hold a Selection of her own.

Eadlyn didn’t think she would find a real partner among the Selection’s thirty-five suitors, let alone true love. But sometimes the heart has a way of surprising you…and now Eadlyn must make a choice that feels more difficult—and more important—than she ever expected.

My Thoughts

I’ve been waiting and waiting for this next bit of the series, and i’m really sad if it’s supposed to be the last one too….which i think maybe it is? Where we were left off in The Heir is a place of utter and complete turmoil.  The selection is going on for Eadlyn, she knows how much the people don’t really care for her as she’s not warm and friendly like her father (or her mother), her brother has gone off and eloped with the princess of France and that results in America having a heart attack and being in limbo.

My first concern was that if you all recall from the last book of the original series, there was turmoil in the palace and the queen ended up dying.  I was getting a sense of deja vu as it comes in this series at a point when Eadlyn had to really step up on her own, and perhaps thought that Ms Cass was going to take us down that same path.  We’re left wondering for quite a bit in this story though if that would happen.

What’s nice here though is that because of all that’s happened over such a short period of time, we see which men in the selection are right for her and which should be doing other things.  while we don’t get to know quite so much about some of them as the boys are whittled down to the Elite much faster, we do at least get to see which relationships are developing as they should.

The gentlemen that you think are front runners are surprisingly maybe not the ones that continue on, and that’s a nice twist that we see.  I feel like while i thought i knew who was going to be chosen, and then i changed my mind, i was still hoping for an ending that we didn’t see.

There’s another twist to the story that’s brought in, and i have to say that i would have loved to see it built out more.  As you’ll remember from the end of the original series, the Illea’s were brought back into the fold because of a friendship with Maxon and America.  What we see here is that there’s a rift with the families, but the son, who’s Eadlyn’s age, well he has an agenda and it’s interesting to see how that manifests itself.  you continue to wonder throughout the story what role he’ll ultimately play since he’s a disturbance in the selection and i think that he’s going to be a disturbance politically as well.

Maxon shares a few interesting secrets along the way with Eadlyn which make some of the characters that we’ve met in the story take on a bigger role and i think that it’s nice to see that there’s more to him than we knew before.

That all being said, this was a sweet continuation of the story, however i feel like maybe we were a bit shortchanged.  I want to see what’s coming next since the reign of Queen Eadlyn is going to be much different since times are changing, but i think that with the epilogue that we got, perhaps this is it.  I want to see what the romance becomes with the characters that we have in the end, and i want to see what happens with those that were ‘cast out’ of the palace since those were some of my favorites.

So all in all, i’m a bit sad that it;s all ended, but very pleased with how the story continued a generation later.  Enjoy!