Review: Unbreakable by Sara Ella

Unbreakable by Sara Ella
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  This book will be published on May 1, 2018.  If you enjoyed Unblemished and Unraveling, I do recommend reading this to find out how it ends.

I hate to do this, but I really struggled with this book. My review is going to be critical. I’m OK with the ending but I did not enjoy how we got there in this installment. It took far too long to resolve things from the 2nd book and actually get to the plot of the 3rd book. I enjoyed Unblemished and Unraveling, but it took me almost a month to finish this book and that is rare. I typically finish a book in a few days, especially if it is YA. I found the writing to be very immature in this book. I didn’t find that to be the case in the first two books. The things the characters say are phrases I expect from a child, not from teenagers. They act like petulant children, not like warriors who have faced and overcome struggles in their lives that the first two books have outlined. While they all have baggage, the actions and dialogue of the adults and teens in this installment were just too immature for my taste and they didn’t fit with the other books.

There wasn’t much character development in this book. We started to see some of the characters develop in book 2. The concept of loving yourself and not needing a boy to make you strong were apparent, but again immaturity struck and I felt that the characters just didn’t really develop much. There are moments when I really respected how far our main character Eliyana Ember, also known as El and Em, has developed throughout the series. Then in the next section she is a sniveling child. In the end she finds her strength and comes to love herself, but I found the conclusion to that plot line very weak and poorly written. Much of her development was centered around the love triangle, not self love as I think the author intended. Atleast that’s how I was left feeling after it was all over. Joshua and Ky are both fighting the Void, but it doesn’t really change their character. They are both the same as they always were. The characters don’t really develop beyond who they were in the beginning. They make some critical decisions that guide the plot, but it doesn’t really impact their development. Ebony on the other hand changes quite a bit from the first book to the last. Much like book 2 there is quite a bit of inner monologue going on and we get a lot of Ebony’s inner perspective about why she is the way she is and what she is feeling. She wants her mother’s acceptance and love, and nothing she ever did was good enough. We come to find that while she puts on a tough exterior, she may just be as broken as everyone else on the inside. Her inner monologue got to be a bit much after a while, especially with the immaturity of the writing. I do like the plot twist at the end that involved Ebony, thought. I didn’t quite see that coming.

I found it very hard to keep track of which perspective we were following. Now I was reading an ARC, and I’m hopeful that in the final edits of the book the chapter headings will include a note about which character we are following. If the final copy doesn’t, it should. The plot, like the perspectives jumped around so much, I never knew what was going on in the book. I often had to go back and reread pages because I felt like I missed something. In the end I realized, the content just wasn’t there. The ending gives enough closure to make the series feel complete but it felt rushed and just very convenient. I didn’t like spending so much time in the character’s heads again. There was a lot of inner thought going on and the characters having conversations with themselves instead of the other characters or words on the page moving the plot forward.

There was so much potential with this series. It was original with the magic system and the fantasy elements. I really liked where it was going with the concept of the Void and the Verity and the different Reflections. While I still feel that the while Void and Verity thing could have been flushed out and explained better, I think the concept was good. The idea of the Reflections and the thresholds was a really unique take on different dimensions existing at once, I just think the execution in book 3 could have been a little stronger. I liked the kind of fairy tale elements that were brought into the story. I just don’t like the way this last book was written. The writing was jumbled and confusing. The plot was all over the place and it didn’t make for an enjoyable reading experience for me.

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