An Un-Calibrated Centrifuge

Since this is the third book in a series, there will be slight spoilers for the first two books (The Name of the Star and The Madness Underneath) and this one.

The Shades of London series is one of my favorite YA series, but The Shadow Cabinet wasn't as great as I was expecting it to be. That's not to say it was bad, it just wasn't as good as I remember the first two being.

The writing felt a lot clunkier in this one. The first two swept me along, so the writing might not be that great, but I didn't notice. The story in The Shadow Cabinet didn't grab me like the other two did, so maybe I was noticing the redundancies and the dialogue as exposition more.

Johnson has this annoying habit of putting white people in kimono (not even kimono, more like kimono-esque clothes) and she should really stop doing that. That was my breaking point with Suite Scarlett (to be fair, I don't think it was a very good book to start with).

Because I haven't reread the series, there were things that felt like they came out of nowhere (mainly Boo's crush on Callum... was that well established in the first two books? It feels claustrophobic to be to have all the characters like each other, also there's that thing of hooking up the two characters of color... not a huge issue, just something I wondered about throughout the book).

This one also reminded me of other works (mainly The Secret History with the Greek rituals and blond incest-implied twins and The Rivers of London... which to be fair I haven't actually read yet). Not in a bad way, but it did pull me out of the story fairly frequently.

The story satisfactorily wrapped up a few loose ends from the last book, but I found the whole Oswulf stone story lacking something. It feels similar to the showdown with Newman at the end of the first book but lacks the punch that storyline had. It is unclear to me how much anyone remembers of what happened in Hyde Park (does anyone remember what happened in Hyde Park?). A lot of stuff happened there, but it's just ignored at the end. There are hints that the story will continue (supposedly something big is coming?), and I'm invested enough that I'll finish it (assuming the next book is the last). I currently don't have faith that this series is going anywhere, but maybe this third book is just a slump, a bad bridge to take us into the finale. We'll just have to wait and see.

ETA: There's also a really uncomfortable scene where Rory is describing Callum as being "built like a thing...."