The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer #3) by Michelle Hodkin

Title: The retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer #3)

Author: Michelle Hodkin

Publication date: November 4^th, 2014

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Number of pages: 470

_______________

Mara Dyer wants to believe there’s more to the lies she’s been told.

There is.

She doesn’t stop to think about where her quest for the truth might lead.

She should.

She never had to imagine how far she would go for vengeance.

She will now.

Loyalties are betrayed, guilt and innocence tangle, and fate and chance collide in this shocking conclusion to Mara Dyer’s story.

Retribution has arrived.

/!\ WARNING. Contains spoilers on book 1 and 2. Read at your own risk. /!\

“You are a girl, Mara. A girl blessed and cursed.”

I expected to feel sad upon finishing that book. But I expected to feel sad because a brilliant trilogy is over, not because the final installment doesn’t live up to the awesomeness of the two first ones.

Yes, you read it right. The retribution of Mara Dyer, which I waited impatiently for over a year, disappointed me. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy it, but waaaaay less than I should have. Did I have too high expectations? Perhaps, that is possible. But here are the facts:

The beginning was kind of messy. Really, it took me a while to figure out what exactly was happening. I thought it was because my memories of Evolution had faded, but even after I read a recap with spoilers on the Internet (thanks Recaptains!) and refreshed my memory, I still didn’t get it. But I kept on reading, because it was the conclusion of the Mara Dyer trilogy, and I HAD to like it.

I did get into the story at some point, around 25% through or something. About time, right? But I wasn’t done with the disappointments yet. There started one of the things that bothered me the most in the whole book. Everything that happens during Mara, Jamie and Stella’s runaway from Horizons is way too easy. They manage to make everyone buy their cock-and-bull story without getting any suspicious, they steal cars just like it was the most normal thing to do, and Jamie overuses his ability and it ALWAYS works although he has never really trained beforehand. Everything goes so smoothly while you would expect that at least a few things to go wrong. Unbecoming and Evolution were brilliant because they felt so real even when supernatural things happened. Retribution was mostly unrealistic.

But that wasn’t the point that disappointed me the most. No, my biggest problem was that all throughout the book, I was looking at the events from the outside. Not even once did I feel the slightest involved in what was happening to my favorite characters. Can you only imagine my disappointment when you know that I completely dived into the two first installments, felt Mara’s confusion, bled from her wounds? My, I want to cry. I didn’t understand Mara at all in Retribution. I can understand she has to harden herself to go through everything she has to go through, but it happened all of a sudden, I wasn’t prepared for that.

Well, I ended up enjoying it towards the end, the last third or so. I really liked it when all the mysteries begin to unravel and when we discover how everything was planned ahead from the very beginning (and obviously I hadn’t see anything coming…). I might be wrong, but I am under the impression that Michelle Hodkin had her ending in mind from the start but didn’t know how to bring it… and she couldn’t delay the release date once more, otherwise her fans would have murdered her, she had to write something anyway. Maybe I’m completely off the mark, but that’s how I feel.

I know I mostly pointed out the negative in my review, but you shouldn’t think I hated this book, because I definitely didn’t. I did enjoy it, in fact, just not as much as I wanted to, which is why mostly negative things come up when I have to talk about it. But no worries, I’m still a fan of this trilogy. I’d gladly reread book 1 and 2 one day, for sure. And part of my sadness when I closed this final book was because the series was over, too.

I recommend this book to you if: I recommend the trilogy to everyone who likes supernatural thrillers, and mind-blowing books.