The Burning White (Lightbringer #5), by Brent Weeks

  What is burning so white? Love, of course. Brent Weeks ends his Lightbringer saga with a huge book that completes all started threads, brings closure to the grieving, love to the survivors, second and third chances to just about everyone. I liked it, as I did the entire series, but for me Burning White was the weakest book in the series.

  And it wasn't that there was anything wrong with the writing, there was just too much of everything. A lot of new information came along, as it did in many of the other books, but in this, everything was being upended every other chapter. People have lost their memories, then they remembered, then the memories were actually wrong, but they were right, and everybody was being connected, but they didn't actually exist, but they did and everything has a glorious design, but you never find out what the actual design was and what the hell white and black luxin actually do and why people don't use them on a daily basis, etc. There was so much to do in the book that the last ten chapters (three of them called Epilogue) were ALL epilogues and then a post credits scene and even a post book scene. And we still don't know who Kip's other grandfather is.

  I am the first to complain about straight lines in books, but in Burning White, lines go all over the place, loop back on themselves, different colors, shape of kittens, the whole shebang. So in the end, when everything has to come to a close, it all feels really really unnatural and even random. Why did that guy die? Why did this guy live? Why is anyone doing anything?

  I know I am filling this space for nothing. If you are going to read the book you probably read the others in the series and no one is going to stop you now. I am not even suggesting it; this is a great book. However, with great epic stories comes great responsibility to end them right. I don't know exactly why I feel so unsatisfied with the ending, but maybe because the author build up all of these grand heroes, only to kind of make them fail until someone changed their view of the world and helped them out. It invalidates a lot of the previous books. Also, less cool magical mechanisms in this one and a lot more talking and feeling.