The Rising Paperback – March 4, 2014

I loved The Otherworld, Cainsville, and Rockton books by this author but this series...It started out strong in the first book, The Gathering. Predictable but still intriguing enough to keep on to book two.Book two, The Calling, relied way to much on repetitive actions which stopped being exciting and became blah after the 3rd dive into the woods/barely escaping...But this last book, The Gathering was insufferable. This was the epitome of telling, not showing. I resorted to reading the first and last sentence of several paragraphs because the descriptions were the same, repeatedly. Worse, she introduced powers and concepts and just abandoned them. Tossing them casually aside when they could have come into play multiple times.Usually focusing on details Armstrong abandoned good story telling for horribly cliché and not well considered teen angst.The ending is what we call a Buffy ending, everything is wrapped up in a last minute summary that doesn't really climax but just..ends happily ever after.The angst was the same as always. Teen love triangle- gag.It was painfully obvious she became bored and disenchanted with her own ideas as the story progressed and she wanted to wrap it up as quickly as possible. As a result, that attitude showed and I became bored and disenchanted with her just blurting everything rather than really taking the reader along for a ride.This book is an incredibly horrible disservice to teens and definitely a flip off to even the basics of good story telling. The sheer amount of trust isolated kids show in newcomers alone is ridiculously out of character for on-the-run teens, let alone the sheer amount of pining, swooning, while in the middle of the life or death crisis.I can't figure out how this horrible, poorly developed drivel came from a usually enjoyable author but in the acknowledgements she thanked people for helping her avoid humiliating mistakes, ignoring that the entirety of this book falls squarely in that category.

I am very torn about this book. On the one hand, some things were done very well. On the other hand, some things left me feeling unsatisfied.This book picks up right where the last one left off. Maya, Daniel and Corey are on the run and trying to figure out what to do next. They realize that they are going to need some help because three teenagers, no matter how intelligent and independent, are not going to be able to deal with two huge organizations with near limitless resources. They end up meeting Maya's twin brother Ash who reminds me a whole lot of Derek personality-wise.We get the fun of more captures, more running and we get to see Chloe and Co. again. I guess my issue is really in the ending of this book. I would not call this a HEA, but at the same time, the ending was kind of the best they could have hoped for. I would like to see a book/story set some years in the future to see how this ended up playing out.Also, I was not happy about Maya's love life. I will admit that in the Darkest Powers trilogy, I fell into the Team Simon minority. I knew that Chloe would end up with Dereck, it was obvious, but that didn't mean I couldn't cheer for the sweet, charming Simon. In this book, I totally did not see this ending based on the other two books. It became obvious as I read this one, what was going to happen, but I was not a fan.Overall, I thought this was a good conclusion. I think the ending made sense for the series. It would have been unrealistic for everyone to just ride off into the sunset, singing show-tunes, but I would like some more answers of later in the characters' lives.

~4.5/5This was a very satisfying ending to this series, even more satisfying than I thought it would be.Some things happened in this book that I wasn't expecting, some of which I definitely should have thought about but hadn't. Pretty much all of which were good. The characters from Armstrong's first YA series, Darkest Powers, showed up, although they showed up later than I thought/hoped they would. Either way, it was very nice to see them again. And it was nice to see how all of the characters acted around each other.The ending for all of the subjects, the agreement that they all decided on, was something that I wasn't really expecting, but something that I'm very happy about. I don't want to spoil anything, but I thought that it worked really well, and fit very well for all of them.The romance also took a turn that I wasn't expecting. Usually it's very obvious from the beginning where the romance is going, who the main love interest is, but for me it wasn't here. And I really liked how it ended. It fits better, makes more sense, and is generally just very nice. From the first book, it looked like it was going to be one person, in the second book I was a little conflicted although still sure it was going toward one person, and then somewhere in this book, I was starting to think that maybe I was wrong. And I was. But it turned out even better than I was expecting, and I'm really happy with how that happened.I don't want to spoil anything, but I'm just really happy with how things turned out. For all of the characters, for the romance, for the parents. For everyone.I want to gush a bit about what happened, but I've decided not to spoil anything, so I'm just going to have to stop there.Now that this series is over, though, and this book had a pretty definite, non-cliffhanger ending, I'm really wondering what Armstrong has planned next. I hope she's working on something else YA, or at least planning to, sometime soon. Whatever it is, though, I'm sure to pick it up. Until then, I'm probably going to have to catch up on her Women of the Otherworld series, seeing as how I've only read two of the books, and there are a lot more than that out.[This review is also available on my blog, along with many others.]