Calamity

Damn, I miss the internet. You could always find people doing stupid stuff on the internet.

Calamity  (Reckoners #3)

By Brandon Sanderson
2016
421 Pages

When Calamity lit up the sky, the Epics were born. David’s fate has been tied to their villainy ever since that historic night. Steelheart killed his father. Firefight stole his heart. And now Regalia has turned his closest ally into a dangerous enemy.

David knew Prof’s secret, and kept it even when the Reckoners’ leader struggled to control the effects of his Epic powers. But facing Obliteration in Babilar was too much. Prof has now embraced his Epic destiny. He’s disappeared into those murky shadows of menace Epics are infamous for the world over, and everyone knows there’s no turning back…

Calamity is the final book of the Reckoners trilogy, tying together all of the theories and possibilities from the previous two iterations as it bustles through another city and another villain.

I had high expectations for this book- it was supposed to make sense of everything and answer all of those questions that have lingered through the 1000+ pages of the series. By the end it did so, but yet… it didn’t.

We got a few revelations about the nature of Epics. We found out about Calamity. We got more romance, more action, more bad metaphors, more inventive powers and scenarios, and another crazy epic city (this time a moving Atlanta made out of salt?)

But the ending still felt messy and convoluted. Without spoiling things, I’ll just say that the conflict got resolved with too much tidiness, and with ample plot holes regarding where the epics got their powers, and how they take ownership of them.

Perhaps Sanderson plans to write more within this universe; perhaps that is why some of the larger questions remain unanswered. What we got with Calamity just didn’t feel like enough of a payoff for a final entry to a series.

Should You Read This?

If you’ve read this far into the series, you might as well. Yeah, it answers many of the questions, and provides some closure to a few topics, but it could’ve been better. I don’t regret spending the time reading it, but it ultimately did not meet the expectations that I had.

And if you haven’t’ read the first two yet? The series might be worth a read for you. As a whole, I’d give these books a solid 3, maybe even a 3.5 if I actually did half points. But this book on its own? 2. To use the Goodreads scale : “it was ok.”
Summary from Goodreads