*** Warning: This review contains spoilers!! ***
There's a lot of explaining in this book. The first several chapters are basically a giant recap to the whole series, which was fine with me because at this point, all the details are getting muddled in my head.
Nightfall very satisfyingly brings in Sophie's human family. I appreciated this new development quite a bit, since I always thought it was a glaring omission of convenience for the Harry Potter series to not integrate Hermione's muggle life into the magical world.
There were a lot of exciting developments, a couple new characters, and Sophie's enhancing ability turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
Still, the unfolding story was as convoluted as ever, with Sophie and others making tenuous connections to move the story forward. The plot seemed to be driven more by explanation than by actual events.
Until now, I had brushed off the love square as an intermittent distraction. But potential relationships were more front and center in this installment, and I just found it to be an annoyance. Probably most readers enjoy the tension, and the choosing of sides for perfect pairings, but I'm just not a fan of superfluous romance that doesn't actually move the story along.
I also found myself disappointed at the lack of storytelling detail. For example, in the sparring match between Keefe and Dimitar, I didn't get any sense of how Keefe, a teenage boy with no training in defense or weapons or fighting, was able to best the highly trained warrior king with only his levitation skill. An actual play-by-play of how he made his strikes would have been nice. Also, more than once, it was a big mystery how Lady Gisela was able to get past Sandor's goblin guard. Apparently, Keefe's ogre bodyguard Ro was able to figure it out "within about three seconds" (p. 559), but we readers were still left in the dark.
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