Locklands (The Founders Trilogy, #3)
Robert Jackson Bennett
A god wages war—using all of humanity as its pawns—in the unforgettable conclusion to the Founders trilogy. Sancia, Clef, and Berenice have gone up against plenty of long odds in the past. But the war they’re fighting now is one even they can’t win. This time, they’re not facing robber-baron elites, or even an immortal hierophant, but an entity whose intelligence is spread over half the globe—a ghost in the machine that uses the magic of scriving to possess and control not just objects, but human minds. To fight it, they’ve used scriving technology to transform themselves and their allies into an army—a society—that’s like nothing humanity has seen before. With its strength at their backs, they’ve freed a handful of their enemy’s hosts from servitude, even brought down some of its fearsome, reality-altering dreadnaughts. Yet despite their efforts, their enemy marches on—implacable. Unstoppable. Now, as their opponent closes in on its true prize—an ancient doorway, long buried, that leads to the chambers at the center of creation itself—Sancia and her friends glimpse a chance at reaching it first, and with it, a last desperate opportunity to stop this unbeatable foe. But to do so, they’ll have to unlock the centuries-old mystery of scriving’s origins, embark on a desperate mission into the heart of their enemy’s power, and pull off the most daring heist they’ve ever attempted. And as if that weren’t enough, their adversary might just have a spy in their ranks—and a last trick up its sleeve.
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0 0**I received an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**
Robert Jackson Bennett wraps up the Founders Trilogy with the final novel, Locklands. Of course, for the concluding novel, it is difficult to discuss without spoilers. I will do my best to avoid them, but proceed with caution anyhow.
Locklands picks up roughly eight years after Shorefall, which I felt was an interesting choice. Shorefall also had a pretty decent time gap from the events of Foundryside. I felt that it was a clever choice of the author to allow for changes to seep into the world and to establish a new point where a great event might occur. After all, it is not so often that the falling of an empire occurs in back-to-back battles, but more often over a span of years. Jackson Bennett did well both in Shorefall and in Locklands to keep readers up to speed on all of the developments that occurred off page.
As in the rest of the trilogy, the world and the magic system remain strong. However, there was a notable shift from books one and two which seemed to establish the rules of the magic and then established the rules of the hierophants. On entering book three, readers know what can be done, and it seemed more about getting the characters into place in order to achieve a common goal in the plot. If book one was Sancia's book, and book two was Clef's, then book three arguably belongs to Berenice. Of course, the novels are much more complicated than simply that, but I still find that to be a decent manner of classification at its root.
Both Foundryside and Shorefall were five star reads for me, but I think that with the absence of learning the rules and the absence of the group dynamics I loved from the first two books, it was impossible for Locklands to achieve the same level of success for me. The cleverness of Robert Jackson Bennett certainly remains and I still found Locklands to be very accessible and readable for the amount of complexity it holds. However, I lacked some of the emotional connection I had in the first two books.
That being said, I can't think of any other way I might have wanted Locklands to end. The ending seemed, in some ways, inevitable and to have done anything differently about the ending might have been unsatisfying.
I was happy to read Locklands early, and will be more than happy to recommend this trilogy to others in the future.
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