A single wild dove’s coo rang out in the saffron sky as she stepped through the gym’s kudzu-swathed doors.

It’s the last chapter, which means I won’t have to read any more sentences like this.  Woohoo!

It’s the last chapter, it starts out slow, there’s a lot of just winding down.  Which means that the vain hope I had for maybe, possibly Ch 19 not being the ‘climax’ is pretty much dead.  Talk about a disappointing payoff.

First of all, the action took place entirely off-page.  Luce didn’t even managed to watch the big final fight.  Sophia didn’t cut it as a Big Bad, because she never managed to be a real threat.  She didn’t even set up that big fight to be a distraction, she just sort of took advantage of it, and all it took to stop her was a few people showing up.  And to cap it all off, the paltry bit of information we got wasn’t building on what came before it and didn’t answer any questions.  It was all new, not the conclusion to old stuff.

Basically, there was no conclusion.  The events of the book did not lead up to any final action.  There was no goal being reached, no questions being answered.  It was a big and shiny event (that we didn’t get to see), but it was self-contained and not the result of the book that came before it.  We had to sit through that entire novel only to get a random short story wandering in at the end, with no payoff for what we’d already read.  If anything, the climax of the novel we’d been reading was way back when Luce and Daniel started macking.

The climactic thrill of piecing Daniel’s true identity together.

…you know, you could have done that a lot earlier with very little effort, and in the scheme of things, “Daniel is an angel” on scratches the surface of the questions that need to be answered.  That’s sort of like saying

“Hey, I need you to finish this project.”

“Okay.  Tell me what I need to know about it.”

“It’s due next week.”

“…and?  Subject?  Criteria?  Guidelines?”
“It’s due next week.”

We still know basically nothing about what’s going on!

They walk around the cemetery, where it’s raining dust, and Daniel explains that it’s less ‘dust’ and more ‘disintegrated angel bodies.’  For some reason, this doesn’t bother Luce, who apparently thinks that ‘tiny flakes of previously living beings’ are all cool as long as you call it dust instead of mortuary ash.  Daniel also mentions that it tends to baffle regular humans when it shows up.

There’s a crazy scientist in Pasadena who thinks it comes from UFOs.

Tell me what part of that is supposed to be ‘crazy’?  This stuff is so thick in the air that Luce literally has to wave her arms around to clear it enough to see.  It’s not natural.  Daniel mentions that scientists study it, so presumably the makeup isn’t actually ‘dust’ as we know it.  It’s an extremely odd thing, and one guy came up with an hypothesis that (maybe?) fits the evidence in front of him.  What part of this makes him ‘crazy’?

You can’t throw supernatural stuff at people and then mock them for coming up with supernatural guesses.  

Luce points out Penn’s father’s grave, so that Daniel can bury her there when there’s less of a furor going on.

“I can’t leave her, Daniel. How can I?”

…the same way you did all throughout the novel when you barely paid any mind to Penn unless she physically grabbed you and dragged you along with the plot?  You were perfectly happy to absolutely never think about the girl without being forced to before now.

Daniel flies her to the lake for kissy times.  Considering their whole excuse for not telling her things was that they weren’t sure what would kill her, he’s sure being free with the kissy.

But then Daniel remembers that the point is to not get Luce killed, and he points across the lake to where Mr. Cole is waiting with a little plane to take her away.

This goodbye is interminable.  It goes on forever.  I’m so sick of their angst that I can’t even be forgiving due to the fact that it is a goodbye.  They fly around in purple prose so purple that I have trouble telling which parts are literally flying and which aren’t, and he gives her a present and there’s much squishy declarations of feelz.

“Whatever happened between you and Cam, it wasn’t your fault. Somehow he held on to a lot of his angelic charm when he fell. It’s very deceptive.”

He showed up and was cute and polite.  I think the issue is more that it doesn’t take much to charm Luce.

Gabbe and Arriane show up for even more goodbyes.  UHG, JUST END ALREADY, YOU ARE ADDING NOTHING TO THE STORY.

Finally, at long last, Luce and Mr. Cole fly off into the sunset while Luce thinks morosely about how useless she is.  And some stuff about love, but eh.

There’s an epilogue, but it’s just Cam and Daniel creepily watching Luce sleep while delivering a bit more sequel bait.  Well, too bad for you, book.  No amount of parlor tricks will entice me to read the rest of this series.  If you can’t figure out how to just be interesting enough to keep me, then…well, you’re not interesting.