HOW GOOD IS IT?

6/10

SO

Even with its flaws, Ruin and Rising is a satisfying conclusion to the Grisha trilogy. Leigh Bardugo is at her best with action scenes and political intrigues.

Alina, despite having an unclear personality, is a simple enough protagonist to relate to.

The romance, for the most part, is unnecessary and unconvincing.

Do I wish a lot of things in this book had been written differently? Yes. But in the end, it does manage to resolve nicely what is important.

RECAP and RANDOM THOUGHTS

Spoilers from this point on.

Alina and the other Grisha are stuck underground with the Apparat, whom they hate, but kind of have no choice but to share the place with.

Under the Apparat’s watch and unable to use her power, Alina becomes weak and depressed.

Mal is less infuriating than he was in the last book, mostly because he doesn’t talk a lot.

One day, Alina tries to facetime with the Darkling as he did in the previous book. After some connection problems, she succeeds. Alina decides maybe she should make this a regular thing because it feels great to hang up on the Darkling (like… cutting the vision short after a lot of teasing).

After staying underground for a while, the Grisha can’t take it anymore, they decide to screw the Apparat and escape to the surface. There’s a new member in the group: a cat who really does nothing for the plot, but it’s cute.

On the way, Alina discovers that Mal has gotten a tattoo that says “I am become a blade” and she’s not happy about it. Why, though? As far as tattoos go, it could have been a lot worse. 

Once they’re out, Alina and the team are ambushed but are luckily rescued by Nikolai. Oh, thank god, a guy Alina can talk to without hating herself. Nikolai then takes them to a brand new mountain hideout.

Nikolai wastes no time in proposing to Alina. But poor Alina still can’t make up her mind because she is unsure whether such an alliance is best for Ravka’s future and her own.

Also, Mal.

On one hand, she has Mal, a cardboard version of Matthias Helvar who has none of Matthias’ charm; on the other, she has a clever, ambitious, optimistic, inspiring and creative prince. It’s just way too hard to choose.

Desperate for some dating advice, I guess, Alina seeks out the Darkling again. She finds him tending to his wounds in his room. When they’re alone, in two seconds, he is sniffing her neck and she’s having a good time making fun of his real name. Erm… hello? We’re in a war!

When Alina comes back, Baghra tells her the whole story of the amplifier creator – Morozova — who was actually Baghra’s father. Well, thanks, we could have used that info before some people got squashed during the last battle, but OK.

Alina has a theory to explain her power, though: maybe she herself is also a descendant of Morozova, which means the Darkling might be her… cousin. OK, you two need to sit each other down and resolve your issues before things get any weirder.

Not long afterwards, all thanks to Sergei, the Darkling attacks the mountain hideout and turns Nikolai into a kind of bird monster.

Baghra sacrifices herself while bringing down the Darkling’s shadow monsters in an awesome scene.

Once again, Alina, Mal, and their group of significantly fewer people than last time have to run for their lives.

They end up finding the legendary firebird, but it turns out: the bird is not the third amplifier, Mal is. I guess at this point, something just has to happen to make us accept that Mal is special too?

Anyway, this means that Alina has to sacrifice Mal if she wants the third amplifier.

Alina feels through the bond that the Darkling is grieving for his mother. Yeah… but you made Nikolai grow talons and stuck Botkin up a tree, so I don’t think we can forgive you, OK?

Nikolai shows up one night to ask Alina to cure him, but she fails. Alina is completely heartbroken to see the clever Nikolai so desperate and hopeless. Why are they not the OTP?

In an abandoned house near the Fold, the gang come up with a plan to rescue the Grisha students from the Darkling. Basically, it involves Alina bending light and making them invisible so they can sneak onto the Darkling’s skiff.

In the Fold, the plan fails. This is why we let Nikolai do the planning, people.

To be fair though, it was a good plan. But the Darkling just understands Alina more than she understands him, so she doesn’t once consider that he only threatened to harm the Grisha children to lure her out. Well, if only Hermione was here to warn you about dark lords who love to send visions into the hero’s mind for manipulation.

Once chaos descends, Mal does the one thing we’ve all been waiting for him to do since Siege and Storm: asking Alina to plunge a dagger through his heart. This way she can have the amplifier. Out of options, Alina does it.

But the amplifier doesn’t work as predicted, it cancels out Alina’s power and creates light summoners out of the other Grisha. It also destroys the Fold and chases the volcra out.

The Darkling is heartbroken to see his other half is… well, not his other half anymore.

While he is distracted, Alina stabs him with Grisha steel. She finally realizes that more power is not always the answer to fight power.

The Darkling asks Alina to call him by his name one last time and dies. A beautiful end that a complex villain deserves.

NOBODY RESURRECT HIM, PLEASE.

Alina goes back home with Mal. Oh, I forgot: yes, Mal is alive because the dagger only killed the part of him that was made up of merzost – forbidden magic. The human Mal is okay. At least that is the explanation in the book.

In the end, Mal gets exactly what he’s always wanted: an ordinary Alina whom he can protect. The problem with this “romance”, though, is no matter what Alina tells the readers, Mal still reads more like her overprotective big brother than a love interest.

Anyway, Alina finds peace again, and she deserves peace and quiet, so I guess it’s all good.

And since the one guy who wanted to make things different for the Grisha is dead, I guess we’ll just have to take Nikolai’s word for it that he will do something about it; because Alina is definitely unavailable at this point and is exactly the girl she was when the story first started. Which means, building a better world is not really on her checklist.