This review does not contain spoilers for the earlier books, for reasons which will soon become clear. A bit odd of you to be reading the review for the end of a series you haven’t read, but you do you.
I finally finished listening to The Heartstrikers series by Rachel Aaron!! I finished a series!
I had read up to book 3 as they came out, and then had a few years gap between 3 and 4, so spent a good chunk of A Dragon of a Different Colour trying to figure out what happened to get us here. Eventually, I just rolled with it. I’m still not entirely sure what happened in book 3.
It seemed to me like A Dragon of a Different Colour ended on a huge cliffhanger, and then Last Dragon Standing picked up right after that, so it makes sense to review them together as I read them pretty much like halves of the same story. I feel profoundly sorry for the people who read these as they were coming out and had to live with that suspense.
A Dragon of a Different Color
Overall I enjoyed A Dragon of a Different Color, it was great seeing these characters, that I remembered surprisingly well, which is clearly a point in the book’s favor, given my overall shit memory. But, I felt like book 4 was too long for my liking.
There are two parallel story threads, one is super intense about saving the world, and the other is … not. It would’ve been fine without the comparison, but I cba to care about dragon family drama when the world might end. Even though it was really good drama, and one of the few things where I remembered the set-up from previous books. The Dragon of China was very cool, and his part of the story packed the emotional punches. I was also happy with the resolution there, it just all didn’t seem that important in the big picture. I just wanted the story to switch back to the other thing all the time.
And for a reasonably long book at 524 pages … I didn’t feel like it really had an ending.
The threads all came together very nicely, but the end is such a massive cliffhanger that it feels like Last Dragon Standing is just part 3 of the previous book.
I’m in a weird place where I enjoyed these two books, they’re great fun, so much magic and dragons, but also very bitchy about them and their pacing. Oh yeah, there’s also a lot of magical theory stuff that’s amazing, some huge reveals and amazing spellwork. I love some good ol magical theory.
Last Dragon Standing
The Hearstriker series finale was short and intense. It did a great job of tying up loose ends and bringing everything together, making for a very neat series ending. There was a lot of emotional payoff as well. Overall I really liked this one a lot more, I’d say because it was much more focused on the high stakes. There were a few sweet interludes, but they sort of evened out the pacing, rather than distract from it.
The narration was great, Vikas Adam is surprisingly good at female voices, so much so that I often forgot it was dude narrating, although at points they do get rather shrill. He also conveys excitement very convincingly.
The characters were obviously the same as in the previous books. I really liked how we got a lot of backstory and explanations in A Dragon of a Different Color, I’m a huge sucker for backstories. I also liked how important being true to themselves turns out to be, in a lot of cases, it’s a bit of recurring theme. We get to meet the chinese dragons in this one. Rachel Aaron does not have happy families. I’ll tell you that much, all her parents are nightmares, and the one we get here, wowza. In Last Dragon Standing we get closure on all fronts, I think all the characters from previous books get to have a little moment and some sort of finale.
I really liked how the series in general, but the final books in particular, really got into the concept of Dragons. We really get to see different kinds of dragons, what traits they share and how flexible or inflexible that leads them to be. We learn about their history and how they ended up in their current state, and then how Julius being a nice dragon plays into it all.
The epilogue was really nice too, I liked how it shows that this story is settled, but also brings back that sense of wonder from the beginning of the series.
I would also like to take a minute to point your attention towards the covers and Bob.
I had read the DMZ series, so I knew a few aspects of the ending, and got another one wrong, which might have cut away some of the suspense, except I don’t think I would’ve expected any different.
Tl;dr
Taken together a great ending to a great series, tying everything together nicely, giving everyone a little time in the spotlight, heavy on action, suspense and magic. By itself book 4 was a little too long and ended too abruptly for me.
Recommended for fans of Dragons, non-typical urban fantasy, fun and lighthearted reads, good guy main characters
Bingo squares: Last book in a series!!!!!!, hmm sorry, I don’t get that a lot, local to Atlanta and Athens, GA, audiobook, self-published, title of for our more words (book 4)
Related reviews by Rachel Aaron: The DFZ series