Too Much All At Once: Linden A. Lewis – The Last Hero

When will I learn that one shouldn’t wait too long between the books of a trilogy? I read The First Sister and The Second Rebel fairly soon after they each came out, but somehow pushed this final entry in the trilogy ahead of me for far too long. Thankfully, Linden A. Lewis has a handy “previously on” guide on her homepage that let me familiarize myself with all the key players, factions, names, and various betrayals that happened prior to this book. It helped.
BIG FAT GIGANTIC SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST TWO BOOKS AHEAD!

THE LAST HERO
by Linden A. Lewis

Published: Skybound Books, 2022
Ebook: 624 pages
Audiobook: 23 hours, 35 minutes
narrated by: Ali Andre Ali, Jennifer Aquino, Neo Cihi, Andrew Kishino, Farah Naz Rishi, Gary Tiedemann, Emily Woo Zeller
Series: The First Sister #3
My rating: 6/10

Opening line: From his office on the 225th floor, Souji val Akira could easily ignore the protesters below. But because he knows they are down there, he stands before the floor-to-ceiling windows, his desk behind him ignored, and looks at the feet of the crystalline buildings shimmering in the Cytherean dome’s azure lighting, past the verdant hanging plants naturally purifying the air, focusing on the writhing mass in the street.

The flame of rebellion burns across the solar system in this dazzling conclusion to Linden A. Lewis’s stunning First Sister trilogy perfect for fans of Red Rising, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Expanse.

Astrid is finally free of the Sisterhood, yet her name carries on. She’s called the Unchained by those she’s inspired and the Heretic by those who want her voiceless once more. Now Astrid uses knowledge of the Sisterhood’s inner workings against them, aiding the moonborn in raids against abbeys and Cathedrals, all the while exploring the mysteries of her forgotten past.

However, the Sisterhood thrives under the newly appointed Mother Lilian I, who’s engaged in high-stakes politics among the Warlords and the Aunts to rebuild the Sisterhood in her own image. But the evil of the Sisterhood can’t be purged with anything less than fire….

Meanwhile, Hiro val Akira is a rebel without an army, a Dagger without a Rapier. As protests rock the streets of Cytherea, Hiro moves in the shadows, driven by grief and vengeance, as they hunt the man responsible for all their pain: their father….

Transformed by the Genekey virus, Luce navigates the growing schism within the Asters on Ceres. Hurting in her new body, she works to bridge two worlds seemingly intent on mutual destruction. All while mourning her fallen brother, though Lito sol Lucius’s memory may yet live on.

Yet Souji val Akira stands in judgment on them all, plotting the future for all of humanity, and running out of time before war erupts between the Icarii and Geans. But can even the greatest human intellect outwit the Synthetics?

The emotional First Sister trilogy comes to a sensational climax in this final installment, and is a must-read for science fiction fans everywhere.

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Soooo, I made the same mistake both when it comes to writing down my thoughts about this book, and when it comes to reading it. Please forgive me when I don’t go into too much detail about the plot. Then again, it doesn’t make much sense to go into detail anyway, this being the third and final part in a trilogy and me trying not to spoil plot points. So we may just manage to get something resembling a review out of this. 🙂

Okay, so things were left in a pretty bad place at the end of The Second Rebel, with some characters in dire situations, others brutalized, maimed, or altogether dead. Not the happiest starting point for a novel, to say the least, but trust me when I say, it can get worse.

This is a rather long book, but with the amount of POV characters that we’ve gained in the previous two volumes, it’s not surprising. Everyone has their own thing going on, their own storyline to further, their own relationships and backstories, and keeping up with all of them simply takes time. A large part at the beginning of the novel is simply spent catching up with all our main players, with Astrid and Hiro, Luce and the twins Castor and Pollux, and several others. This was good for me, as it let me re-familiarize myself with where everyone is in space as well as politically speaking. Linden A. Lewis has set up quite the intricate web of political intrigue, betrayals, and religious fanatics, which leads me to my main grip with the book.

It’s just too damn much. The author is trying to juggle not only a very complicated plot with so many important characters, while at the same time making statements about gender and sexuality, disability, class differences, having some eat-the-rich-type revolutions, uncovering secret medical experiments, telling some romantic sub-plots between characters, and giving almost every single one of them a backstory that could fuel its own novel. That may sound good on paper, but it’s just so overwhelming that I simply stopped caring at a certain point. The near endless piling on of betrayals renders them meaningless. It’s like every character wanted to be the main character, so in the end, nobody got to be that. In an ensemble cast, there needs to be more variation, and I don’t mean in terms of racial/gender/sexual diversity. Lewis does great on representation! I mean you need a quietercharacter, or one who simply assists. Not everyone can, or should, always hog the spotlight.

That said, I did have favorites, although my preferences are deeply colored by the medium through which I experienced the novel. Because Neo Cihi, the non-binary voice actor who narrates the non-binary character Hiro val Akria, is so great that every chapter was a delight. Astrid is narrated by well-known narrator Emily Woo Zeller, who is fantastic, if always a bit too sexy. In stark contrast was the woman who read Luce’s pats…
Dear god, she drove me UP THE WALL by the end! Her voice was so monotone, there was hardly any emotion detectable, but even worse were the strange and, frankly, wrong pauses she kept throwing in at random points. It felt like she hadn’t even skimmed the book before recording, the way she just stops in the middle.
Of a sentence. (See what I did there?)
This is just the one example that comes to mind and that’s easy to reproduce in writing, but she does this all the time. Like nobody explained how commas work or that the end of a line does not automatically equal the end of a sentence. The fact that she barely modulates her voice just made it even harder to concentrate and listen attentively. Because the other POVs are narrated by other people, the contrast made this even harder to endure. I honestly thought of just skipping Luce’s chapters and reading them in print, then continuing the audiobook with the next narrator. That’s how bad it got.

Another little thing that always annoys me when audiobooks are narrated by multiple people is when they pronounce names differently. Seriously, can’t the publisher or production studio or whoever’s in charge decide on a pronunciation for this place or that person’s name and inform all narrators on how to say it? Because it’s just so annoying when the person reading Hiro says “Akira” with the emphasis on the first “a” and then some other narrator says “Akeeeeera”. It comes across as very unprofessional – not on the part of the narrators, mind you, but the people who hired them to record this or that part of the book. Get it together, audiobook publishers!

As for the actual content, meaning the plot of this book, apart from being over the top on pretty much every level, it still has that special something that kept me reading this far. I can’t put my finger on it, but Linden Lewis does something right. I like the writing style, I like the diversity, the science fictional ideas, the themes… all the ingredients are there and they are grass-fed, 24-hour-pasture time, happy organic ingredients that should make one awesome sfnal pie. But to mix metaphors a bit, we all know that too much salt can ruin even the best of dishes, and I’m afraid that was this novel’s downfall, at least for me.

I did like how the author decided to end things, in term of where the warring factions stood, who “wins” and who loses, who gets revenge and who has to find out that revenge was never what they needed in the first place. I liked the point where we leave it all, even if it isn’t all happy, sometimes not even bittersweet. Even if getting there felt like a chore, at times. It is a very fitting for a tale this dramatic and epic and world-spanning, in any case. Would I have preferred a tighter focus, fewer POV characters, and less back-stabbing? Sure. Will I read whatever Lewis writes next anyway and with gusto? Hell, yes!

MY RATING: 6/10 – Good