Title: The Midnight Star
Author: Marie Lu
Publisher/Year: Penguin Publishing 10/11/16
Length:   336 Pages
Series:  The Young Elites

Overview

The thrilling finale to the New York Times bestselling Young Elites series from “hit factory” Marie Lu

There was once a time when darkness shrouded the world, and the darkness had a queen.

Adelina Amouteru is done suffering. She’s turned her back on those who have betrayed her and achieved the ultimate revenge: victory. Her reign as the White Wolf has been a triumphant one, but with each conquest her cruelty only grows. The darkness within her has begun to spiral out of control, threatening to destroy all she’s gained.

When a new danger appears, Adelina’s forced to revisit old wounds, putting not only herself at risk, but every Elite. In order to preserve her empire, Adelina and her Roses must join the Daggers on a perilous quest—though this uneasy alliance may prove to be the real danger.

My Thoughts

When we left all of these characters at the end of book 2, we saw that there was a huge divide, not only because Adelina’s powers have overcome not only herself but others, but there were deaths of beloved friends that followed.  Her powers have taken on such a dark twist that even her sister can’t be with her, and she’s fled along with others who were once not just best friends but necessary to survival.

In this final installment, we see a lot of things happening.  Adelina is on a mission to right what was wronged for so long, to rid the world of the word Malfetto and to make sure that all that are marked finally get the joy of life that they deserve with those who mock them being punished or killed.  She rules with a heavy hand for most of her time in order to make sure that people believe that she’s powerful, and it’s only through the help of Magiano, the guidance that he has been able to give because of emotions at play that we see that she’s able to turn the tides a bit and perhaps win people over with another side.

If that were only enough right?  If you remember, towards the end of the last book, we learned that it was the elite’s powers themselves that would cause them to become weak and die and we have seen that with Lucent and some of the others getting sick and weakening.  We see that Teren’s powers of healing are slowing and we knew that Adelina’s illusions were likely because of her own powers turning on her.  So in this finale we see them come to terms with the fact that in order to survive they need to give up their powers, but it’s not that easy.  We know that there are 12 gods that they consider to be important and they need representation of all of those gods to give the powers back.  That means that they have to bond together, elites that hate each other and are repulsed in the hopes that they can survive.

This is how Violetta and Adelina come back together.  Lucent and Queen Maeve along with the others.  it’s a sweet culmination to the story – to know that those who hate each other have to fight together to really survive.

What’s nice about this story is that we don’t get the happy ending that you were all hoping for.  Too many of our friends are killed on the quest for salvation, and that means that ironically there are quite a few broken hearts.  When we were able to raise them from the dead in the past, that’s something that Queen Maeve is no longer able to do because her powers are weak, and she now knows better.  So we see that there are consequences for her yes, but for Tristan and Enzo who were raised from the dead along with others that we wished could be revived.

I feel like we got an interesting finale to the series – it’s a bit different than the other installments as this one was based more in mythology than the others.  what i mean here is that we knew that the marked got their powers from the blood fever which is as a result of the descent-ion of a god, but we never spent that much time on it before.  In this final book though, we spend a lot of time getting to the root of things since that’s the only way that they determine that they can be saved, and while i like the thought here, i dont know that i’m necessarily a huge fan anymore of all of that stuff.  I spent a while reading angel type books (if you go back a year or 2 in my blog you’ll see that). it’s nice to see where things are derived, but i feel like it veered a bit off from the first 2 books.

Regardless, like i said, a bittersweet ending to this trilogy, but we get closure for most of the characters that we’ve spent a lot of time with.  I hope you enjoyed it and have a good weekend!