Let’s get this knocked out.

A guard comes and opens up their room the next day, making the whole 48-hour lock thing completely pointless.  They find out that the guard who was sent to tell of their location was killed, so Maxon wants to go run off and assure his mother that he’s alive.  But he’s distracted by the fact that the rebels painted “WE’RE COMING” all over the walls again.

Coming where?  Seems like you already came.

Huge stains in the carpet announced where someone, perhaps a helpless maid or fearless guard, had died.

Maids, being girls, are always helpless and cowering.  Guards, being dudes, are the brave ones.  America just can’t fathom the idea of a helpless guard or a fearless maid.

Unless said maid is fearlessly putting on a brave face before she runs off to cry in her room, I guess.

Because fuck feminism.

Also, it seems the families of the Selection girls are being targeted to make them leave, even though the girls can’t decide to leave even if they want to.

But America says not to bother sending guards to her family because she figures she’ll be home soon enough, what with being kicked out and all.

She runs around and thinks about how torn up the palace is.

But the time and money it would take to restore this was beyond my imagination.

Yes!  Yes!  Think about how wasteful the palace is!  All that money, while you’re people starve!  And this isn’t the first attack they’ve cleaned up after!

The rebels were very thorough.

Oh.  Oh, I see.  You’re not concerned about that, just about the rebels messed everything up.

God damnit, you failure of a protagonist.

She finds her maids and Aspen all in her room, crying over her.  They hug and cry for a while, then America says she’s going home, and Mary actually asks why.  She saw that “presentation” on the news and actually asks why.

*sigh*

So the maids go off to get her clothes so she can leave “in style,” leaving just Aspen and America in her room to be smoopy.  Aspen says he’ll send her money and all, because he’s “got plenty,” and they can get married and such, basically he’s finally acknowledging everything that made their drama moronic all throughout these books, and without batting an eye.  America says she just wants some space to “recover” even though the entire point of both books has been her whining about getting married.

Fuck, didn’t the last book end like that?  She was all “no, I chose me” and then that amounted to fuck-all nothing?

I mean, more power to her for saying all this stuff about needing space and all, but I’ve seen this trick before.  It didn’t work then, and I don’t trust it now.

So, Aspen promises to wait for her, because that’s all these books are.  Just people waiting.

So the next chapter, America gets dressed up in her last fancy dress and gets ready to leave, then mopes because Maxon hasn’t come to say goodbye to her.  Then there’s more moping about pretty everything is and she suddenly doesn’t want to leave because America always wants whatever it is she doesn’t have, regardless of circumstance. 

Well, to the book’s credit, that is a very 16 year old way to think.

Suddenly, Maxon!  He came to tell her he lied his ass off to his dad, saying that America saved him in the attack instead of the other way around, because apparently the only way to get a badass girl in this book is if it’s a lie.  Point being, king agreed that she can stay.

Maxon, rather rightly, says that he loves her but he doesn’t trust her, because every time she has the slightest doubt about him she assumes he’s a monster and acts out like a child.  Damnit, after that abusive display before, stop being so reasonable now!

Oh, okay.  He stops being reasonable.  Kriss comes out asking about their plans for private dinner, so Maxon makes those while America is standing right there, and according to our supposedly-reliable narrator, it’s because he wants her to see “the consequences of her actions.”

So America has to trust Maxon and stop acting out, but when Maxon doesn’t trust America, he can flaunt his other girlfriends in front of her?  Douche.

At least Kriss is genuinely happy to hear that America is sticking around.

As she heads back to her room, she runs across the king, who wants to have a little chat.  He basically lists all the reasons she’d make a terrible queen, while I cheer in the background.  America says she’s sticking around as long as Maxon wants her, so the king implies that a young man’s heard is fickly and anything could happen, and indeed, might already have happened.

So America immediately assumes Maxon is sexing up all the other Selection girls, despite 1) that whole conversation she just had about not jumping to conclusions and 2) FUCKING CLARKSON IS AN ABUSING ASSHOLE WHO DOESN’T WANT YOU THERE AND YOU KNOW IT, THE MORE OBVIOUS ANSWER IS THAT HE’S JUST LYING.

FUCK, CAN YOU REALLY NOT REMEMBER STUFF THAT HAPPENS WITHIN THE SAME CHAPTER.

Screw all those other reasons.  America shouldn’t be queen because she has the memory of a goldfish.

America decides he’s just a main old tyrant who can’t tell her what to do.

And that’s it.  The end of the whole book.  What changed?  At least in the first book, she went from being at home, to being in the Selection, to being one of the final six.  In this book…NOTHING FUCKING CHANGED.  She went from final six to final four, and that’s it.  Everything this book supposedly “revealed” is information we already knew, so we didn’t even get to learn more about the world, and from the romance angle, her relationships with both boys are in exactly the same place.  Nothing, not one single solitary thing, changed this entire book.  It was a pointless mess of idiocy and filler.

And you guys are going to make me do the last one, aren’t you?  Ugh.