The Last One by Rachel Howzell Hall

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Explosive and enthralling romantasy debut from New York Times bestselling author Rachel Howzell Hall...

Thrown into a desolate land of sickness and unnatural beasts, Kai wakes in the woods with no idea who she is or how she got there. All she knows is that if she cannot reach the Sea of Devour, even this hellscape will get worse. But when she sees the village blacksmith fight invaders with unspeakable skill, she decides to accept his offer of help.

Too bad he’s as skilled at annoying her as he is at fighting.

As she searches for answers, Kai only finds more questions, especially regarding the blacksmith who can ignite her body like a flame, then douse it with ice in the next breath.

And no one is what—or who—they appear to be in the kingdom of Vinevridth, including the man whose secrets might be as deadly as the land itself.

Trigger & Content Warnings: injury, death, amnesia, poisoning, alcohol, homophobia, imprisonment

The Last One is Rachel Howzell Hall’s first foray in romantasy, and it’s pretty obvious: the book very much felt like a contemporary novel slapped inside a fantasy world, but I still had a little fun reading it. Very Fourth Wing vibes.

It’s certainly quick and easy to read, which is the same vibe I had with Yarros’s novel. The storyline moves relatively quickly: we’re thrown right into the story from the very first page when Kai wakes up in the woods with no memory of who she is or why she’s in the woods completely naked. And there’s a thief stealing her clothes and Very Important Amulet™, which leads her to this small village of Maford that begins her journey searching for the answers to her identity.

There’s a lot going on in The Last One, but sometimes I felt like there was too much going on. We’re bouncing from place to place and meeting various characters here and there as Kai discovers she needs to reach the Sea of Devour to fully find the answers she’s looking for. She starts making her way there, but like any journey, it’s not without setbacks and trials. I enjoyed the world-building and following Kai’s journey, but I felt like we get info-dumped, especially as we get toward the end. It made the reading experience feel a little disjointed.

The characters just overall seemed… meh aside from one or two characters. There’s not much I can say about them development wise aside from the bare minimum: one of them is a blacksmith, one of them is his adopted sister, another seems to hold a key to Kai’s past — almost all of them holding their own secret.

I also wasn’t the biggest fan of the instalove that immediately takes place and felt like it detracted from what’s going on in the story multiple times — Kai would talk about their next steps and then her thoughts would run into a tangent about Jadon’s hotness or making innuendoes that were pretty irrelevant to the conversation going on before bouncing back. (But take that with a grain of salt because I generally dislike instalove and your mileage may vary.)

At first I didn’t mind it too much, but eventually it got to where it felt exhausting because it felt like a constant back and forth and repetitiveness. I enjoyed their back and forth though, and Kai’s quips and thoughts as she goes about figuring things out and unlocks her powers are probably what made the book much enjoyable since they were so comical. The Last One overall felt like it was dragging its shoes in the sand otherwise.

This honestly might be my least favorite book from Red Tower. I didn’t hate this one, but I’m also not super jumpy about picking up later books. Maybe if I were in a very particular mood, I’d probably enjoy it more. If you enjoyed Fourth Wing a lot, you might enjoy The Last One a lot more than I did because I definitely think this is targeted toward a specific audience. I’m not exactly that audience, so this falls more of a miss for me.

Sophia

Blogger at Bookwyrming Thoughts · Website · Read More Posts

Sophia started blogging in February 2012 for the hell of it and is surprisingly still around. She has a GIF for nearly everything, probably listens to too much K-Pop and is generally in an existential crisis of sorts (she's trying her best). More of her bookish reviews and K-Pop Roundups can be found at The Arts STL.

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