The Core concludes the Demon Cycle series by Peter Brett, and it was a disappointment to me. While we still get a couple of cool side characters, the main cast has grown unrelatable to me. The story often felt like a mix of fanfiction and a detailed narration of a video game: hack, slash, get your dreams, feel mandatory doubt and off you go to your heroic journey, filled with never-too-difficult enemies. The bit of relevant character development itself (Renna, mostly) seemed to have taken place between books.
Also, we get a whole new generation of kids, just for the sake of it, it seems. They take up an inordinate amount of pages (pregnancy, birth, carrying them around) for no contribution, really. I hope they’re not meant to be the tie-in for a sequel series. They felt as cringe-y as the Harry Potter kids, down to the names.
In conclusion: I really liked the first book in the series, and the following books were worse, both in story/pacing and characters and also remember the racism. This one didn’t even reach this level. My patience with the vastly annoying and stereotyped Krasians (a vaguely muslimic hurr-durr warrior culture) never paid off, but I’ll spare you the rant about that.
