EPTHowever, I can't bring myself to read them again because the ending was just so awful, I felt. I'm wondering if anyone else feels the same.
The whole series is essentially leading up to a climactic ending, and that's what I was always expecting. I read them over the space of probably four years, and the whole plot was amazing to me. "This is the way things were meant to be" almost became my motto. Saint Dane always seemed to beat Bobby, no matter what, or at least appear to beat him. Nothing ever came easy. But in The Soldiers of Halla, Bobby and the travelers defeat him so easily in every single battle or fight or whatever.
It felt like I had been cheated. I expected a long, seemingly unwinnable final battle or series of battles that had always taken place between the travelers and Saint Dane, and Bobby somehow pulling it off narrowly in the end. But SD just got beaten badly seemingly without much effort at all. I hated that- it seemed to betray the entire previous 9 books. SD was impossible to defeat, but all of the sudden he's just a whimp. It made the final book seem to be just a victory lap, essentially.
And then there's the whole deal about Solaris (is that what it's called? I can't remember). Figuring out the origins of the travelers and what their lives would be like after the whole ordeal was almost the entire conflict of the book. Every single book in the series leads up to us figuring out the mysteries of the travelers, their beginnings, etc. Solaris seemed like an easy way out and completely uncreative. I remember being extremely disappointed by it. It's been quite some time since I've read them so I can't give any concrete examples- I don't really remember how Solaris worked.
The whole final book was just a huge huge disappointment. The whole series was so amazing and epic, and every book pointed toward the end and created expectations of greatness, but it wasn't delivered, at least I felt. I really do want to read them again because they were so good, but because the ending is so bad I can't bring myself to do it. I would just read the first 9 again, but that just leaves off without that great ending that's expected.
Anyone else have gripes with the books?
After that I was hooked enough to keep reading.
