I'm a book fiend, and I had been waiting for the last installment of the Selection series since the day the last one came out. They are nice little escapes from reality, and I love being able to crank them out in less than a day. So when I bought "The Crown," the last installment by Kiera Cass, read the first chapter and put it down for a few days, I knew something was wrong.
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Alert: Spoilers ahead
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What the hell? I understand trying to finish out a series and tie up all the loose ends, but this book seriously suffered for it. For background, Cass only dedicated two books to Eadlyn's story, though she gave three whole books and several short stories to America. In retrospect, this didn't make much sense to me when Eadlyn had the much more interesting story. Sure, America was the peasant girl rising to the rank of queen, but the story of the first daughter destined to be queen and the first woman to hold her own Selection was much more interesting to me. The former has been told a thousand times, I get it. I know how it ends.
After the ending of "The Heir" left me in tears (missing brother, mother has a heart attack) I was expecting so much out of "The Crown," and it may have been there, but I was rushed through it so fast that I didn't have time to appreciate it at all. One second we had 32 boys, then there were eight, then there were four, then there were two, then there was one and then she was queen and married and boom. End of book, end of series. Did that make you dizzy? Because it left me a bit nauseated from the speed.
The pacing of the book was so erratic that I couldn't place myself in time. How long did it take her mother to recover exactly? Why was her father so willing to coronate her then and there?
If The Selection series with America was unbelievable, a peasant girl who doesn't want to be a princess winning the heart of the prince, then this book is downright fantasy. A princess just asks her Dad if he will step down and make her queen? At 17? While he is perfectly healthy and able to rule? And he says yes? Not one, but two, of her top 8 men are homosexuals? And for each other? She marries the translator of one of the men, and everyone is just peachy? Then why did she have a Selection in the first place? And why was Henrik so unaware until the last minute, and then totally fine with it? His position as king was just stolen from him by his trusted friend and ally! How rude!
Also, as a side note, turning Erik into Eikko was pointless and confusing. The trope of discovering someones "real name" isn't cool anymore, and it left me confused about why she bothered to do this so late in the book. Was it to make their love story more believable? It didn't do anything for me. I believed it, but I didn't believe whatever the hell Eikko was supposed to be doing. Erik worked just fine.
The ending of "The Crown" was especially fantastical, and left me deeply unsatisfied. After years and years of a monarchy, with no way to prepare the people in the slightest, Eadlyn, queen for all of three hours, declares them a constitutional monarchy. She not only gives up her own power, but the power her entire family has fought and died for. There were ways for her to make the country a better place without resorting to such fantasy. If this was the real world, her country would be in ruins by now. You can't just tell people to rule themselves and expect it to go well if you haven't prepared them. Get your act together Eadlyn. Didn't your father teach you any better?
Overall, it was a wrap up of the entire series stuffed into 300 pages when it probably needed twice that. Cass created an amazing world and cast of characters that deserved a better ending than this. Everyone seems to be happy in the end, but that left me less than overjoyed. I read the book, and I will still love the Selection series, but I'll always wish it had been given a proper send-off.
