Further Thoughts on Ruin and Rising

*Spoilers.*

As I said in my review, Ruin and Rising left me with a lot of thoughts that I’m still trying to reconcile. I’m letting loose with spoilers today to get into some of that, and while there are plenty of topics I could talk about, I want to focus particularly on the ending.

Ending a series is always tough, as I’ve noted, and often, the greater the stakes, the harder it is to bring it all to a satisfying close. With the Shadow and Bone trilogy, there are certainly high stakes: a teenage Chosen One who’s seemingly the only hope to save her country, a villain who’s growing ever more powerful and who’s wreaking increasingly-personal destruction in her life on those she cares about, a creepy wasteland full of shadow monsters, mythical creatures who grant untold power, and so on and so forth.Everything rises to a fever pitch as we ask, “How’s our heroine possibly going to beat all that?”

Alina is convinced that the only way to defeat the Darkling is to unite all three of Morozova’s legendary amplifiers, which is majorly forbidden in Grisha circles. They believe no one is meant to wield that much power, but Alina already has the stag and the sea whip, feeling their power coursing through her. At the same time, they make her long for even more, and so she studies lore and convinces Mal to help her chase what she supposed to be the third and final amplifier, the firebird.

She gets a rude awakening when she comes to realize that the third amplifier isn’t the firebird at all. It’s Mal, the boy she’s loved since childhood, and the only way she can claim that power for herself is to kill him. I knew there was something going on with Mal, even though I wasn’t expecting this and it very conveniently turns out he’s a descendant of Morozova. But the reveal sets up a classic dilemma for Alina. Her hunger for greater power has already driven her to do things she normally wouldn’t, and she worries that she’s being corrupted just like the Darkling was—killing the boy she loves would seem to be an obvious point of no return. At the same time, though, she still doesn’t truly think there’s a way she can beat the Darkling without the third amplifier, so in a sense, she’s facing the prospect of giving Ravka up to the Darkling so that Mal can live.

During the final big showdown in the Fold, we of course come to the moment where the choice has to be made, and Mal winds up begging Alina to sacrifice him so she can claim the power and fulfill her destiny (not gonna lie, the love story between Mal and Alina leaves a lot to be desired.) Her heart breaking, Alina does just that, but when his death doesn’t bring any amplification to her power, she’s immediately horrified at what she’s done and begs the Corporalki twins, Tolya and Tamar, to heal Mal and bring him back to her.

That’s when we see the true purpose of the final amplifier. When Mal is revived, Alina’s super-special Sun Summoner power flows into every non-Grisha in the nearby vicinity. Alina’s power alone, no matter how much she amplified it, wasn’t enough to defeat the Darkling and destroy the Fold, but all of them together can. It’s a little reminiscent of the series finale of Buffy, which rejects the whole Chosen One idea and divides one hero’s power among many previously-non-powered folks.

I’m not mad about that, and it jives with what we come to learn about Morozova. While a lot of people in Grisha society devalue non-powered people, he respected and revered them, defying the elitist/separatist notion that Grisha lives can’t mesh with those of ordinary humans. And it’s definitely more interesting to me than Chosen One Alina becoming The Most Powerful of Them All and vanquishing the darkness all by her lonesome.  However, I’m conflicted about the fallout from that: Alina losing her powers when they’re spread among the non-Grisha.

Alina begins the series not wanting to be Grisha, not wanting the weight of the Savior mantle and mostly just wanting to be ordinary. Over the course of the trilogy, as she learns to embrace her power, she realizes just how much of herself she was denying by suppressing her ability. She’s still overwhelmed at the thought of the whole Savior thing, but she recognizes that her powers are part of who she is and loves that about herself. The most difficult part for her is trying to figure out if Mal can fit into that equation. He still loves her, but he’s miserable in Siege and Storm as he backs her up in her Chosen One mission, and he gets heavily into his feelings about how there’s nothing he can offer her as a non-Grisha.

In light of that, Alina losing her powers is really hard for me to accept. You might say that it’s the price she pays for meddling too much with forces that Grisha aren’t supposed to touch, greedy for too much power. But it also kind of feels like a way for her and Mal to ride off into the sunset together, and I don’t like that she has to lose part of herself for that to happen. Alina grew up living a half-life, pushing down her abilities and denying her own sense of self, in large part because she was so afraid of anything that could take her away from Mal. To have her finally come into herself, only to be deprived of that, kind of sucks, and I’m definitely of the opinion that if Mal can’t handle Alina as she really is, it’s less of a satisfying conclusion for him to end up with her only after she’s brought back down to being “just” a human. There’s something uncomfortable in that. I was varying degrees of lukewarm about Alina/Mal throughout the trilogy anyway, and this was not the way I would’ve wanted to see them get together in the end.

Ruin and Rising (2014)

The third book in the “Grishaverse” series and the last in the Alina Starkhov trilogy. There’s a lot to like about this book, but there are parts that frustrate me too. While I enjoyed this trilogy on the whole, I’m still mulling over how it ends, and although I’m glad that I still have four more books to go in this universe, it’ll be nice to follow different characters going forward.

After taking an incredibly hard hit in Siege and Storm, Alina has gone to ground. She’s accompanied by a few factions of allies, but she knows not everyone survived their last encounter with the Darkling, and the fates of some of her friends are still unknown. With the Darkling more determined than ever to harness her powers, Alina sets her sights on an ancient, immensely-powerful creature as her only hope of defeating him.

There’s a line in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead where the lead player says, “Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they can reasonably get,” and that’s kind of the theme of this book. Things get dark. And I know there was a tertiary character who got disemboweled in the last book, but there are moments here where I had to pause in my reading to go, “Yikes, that’s horrific!” In addition to the general angst, moral complexities, and literal army of darkness, we’re treated to some additional body horror. There are tense moments when you’re not sure if some of your favorites are going to survive, or if they’ll be able to live with what they have to do to get through it.

We also have Grisha lore and historical world-building galore, getting much deeper into Morozova, the amplifiers, and the whole concept of Grisha tampering with forbidden power. A fair amount of this ties into the present – while it all hangs together with an internal consistency and some of it really adds to a few of the characters for me, I find other parts a bit too convenient. For the most part, the trilogy has done a decent job navigating Alina’s Chosen One narrative without going too rote with it, but some of the historical tie-ins here are a little too “and lo, it is as it was foretold” for my tastes.

In the midst of all that darkness and that the nuts and bolts of Grisha amplifiers, though, the book takes time for important character beats and developing relationships. I appreciate the moments of characters reckoning with who they are, as well as characters relating to one another. There’s a slow-burn romance that pays off here in a really nice way, and I like getting a more complex view of characters who’ve previously had less dimension.

Ending a story, especially an epic, is tough. It’s really hard to wrap things up, to give the hero a victory that feels earned with well-laid groundwork but doesn’t feel too expected or predictable. The question of how much the hero has to sacrifice to save the day, whether there can be a happily-ever-after in store and who will make it to the final pages intact. For my money, lots of series stumble on the finish line. As for Ruin and Rising, I’m still thinking about the ending quite a bit, so it’s memorable at the least. But I also feel really torn on it, with parts of it feeling thematically resonant while others don’t sit well with me. More on that another day when I can go into spoilers.

As I’ve said, the Alina trilogy is definitely much better than three books to hurriedly get through so I can get to the Crows. The story is gripping, the characters are engaging, and the tangled morality it explores is compelling. I’m happy to have read these books and excited to see Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising adapted for the Netflix series (especially since I’ve enjoyed the changes they’ve made for the show – will they ultimately take things in a direction I find more satisfying?) That said, I’m also super excited to be leaving Alina’s story and moving onto the Six of Crows duology. Give me all the Kaz, Inej, and Jesper action, please!

Warnings

Violence, disturbing imagery, sexual references, drinking, and strong thematic elements.