*bawling eyes out* ( )

I enjoyed the story of this one the best in the series after The Giver. I enjoyed Matty but I felt Lois made weird choices and too little research into random details about nature. It pissed me off when she said he heard an owl flying because owls famously fly silently.

Other reviews hated the new characters becoming the mains in novels after The Giver but I may have grown tired of Jonas and Gabe if they were the only focus of the series as they are not protagonists with a lot of agency in the first book: they act because they are forced to in order to survive not because they are looking for adventure. ( )

Matty enjoys his job as his village's courier, bringing messages to whoever needs them, but worries about the new rumblings in town of residents wanting to stop newcomers from joining their society. He becomes determined to get his friend from a nearby community over to his village while he still can.

So, this book brings together the first two titles in the series, showing the connection between them that was hitherto unknown. For that, I definitely appreciated it. It was also good to see how the various characters have grown and developed in the intervening years since we saw them last.

However, that being said, I felt like this book brought up topics (e.g., the trade market suddenly becoming evil) without fully explaining them, although I suppose there's still potential in the last book of the series to answer everything completely. I'm not so sure about that though as so far, I feel like each book only raises more questions. I also really didn't like the ending of this book with Matty having to sacrifice his own life to stop the forest from taking over and in general didn't like to see that even the newest society was already having issues, as that was really demoralizing and didn't leave much hope for the small changes that had been made in places like Kira's community.

As I've gotten this far already, I am going to continue on to the next and final book in the series to see what happens but if this one had been first, I probably would have dropped the series right away. ( )

Mystery

I raced through this one, as I was eager to find out what happened with Matty and Kira. I'm not sure I liked the ending, it felt a bit rushed, but liked the book overall. ( )