This review will be finished when I have time!
Three stars? I guess? This book wasn’t bad, but it was a bit disappointing for an arc finale.
This books’s writing was typical Survivors quality: not bad, but not good. It feels pretty similar to the other Erin series by this point (the ones with the old style, not whatever is happening with Warriors now), but that could also be my nostalgia wearing off as I progress through the series. I think there were a couple typos again, which was disappointing, but thankfully there weren’t so many as to be distracting. So overall, a pretty average Erin Hunter reading experience.
Storm of Dogs is. . . Weird. A lot of the book is more of the same as the last two, with constant worrying about the Fierce Dogs and LOTS of conversations about doing things but not much actual action. Lucky getting captured at the beginning was fun as a way to switch up the dynamics, and it worked well for explaining Blade’s motivation in more detail. But what was really confusing to me was the climax. After six books of buildup and fear of this Storm of Dogs, to have it just be a fight against the Fierce Dog pack felt very anticlimactic. It also would have been weird to bring other Packs into the mix, but I do think the entire book felt like a confusing letdown without more variables in this supposedly hectic final battle. It was too cut and dry, and despite the book doing a good job killing characters we actually kind of cared about, the stakes didn’t feel high.
The book also really struggled with trying to focus on Storm and Lucky without actually shifting the POV from Lucky. This has been an issue since book 4, but it was especially evident in this one. Storm feels like she should be a second main character, but she’s not. It just reads weird and makes Lucky fall into that ‘bystander is there to be a pair of eyes watching the actual plot’ issue (although it is nice to have that happen to a male character for once- the Erins almost always have their female leads take the backseat in the story).
Character time!
Lucky was, as usual, a functional main character. He doesn’t really have any uniqueness left, but he carries the story well enough, and I quite liked how his story ended. I still wish his romance with Sweet has literally any effort at all put into it, but that’s not too surprising, and at this point it’s just a given.
Sweet herself was a nothing character as usual. I’m glad she finally got to showcase her swift-dog speed that was played up so much in earlier books, but again Sweet was just a functional character. Nothing special, though I am still glad a female dog became Alpha.
Storm was, as I said, weird to read about because it really felt like she was the dog the book should have focused on. She wasn’t bad, but I think having her develop and grow while leaving our POV character, Lucky, flat really detracted from the impact her story could have had. Storm was alright.
I appreciate that this book wasn’t afraid to kill off a character or two, but I honestly wish more had died. We didn’t know Splash really at all, so just killing off Martha felt like a bit of a cop-out. I think killing even just one more dog would have made the final battle feel at least a little more important, instead of the anticlimactic, disappointingly normal dogfight it turned out to be. The other side characters are fine. Bella is allegedly developing to be more mature and like Sweet, but we don’t get to see this, so as usual it falls flat. Arrow was a fun addition, but he doesn’t really have any personality yet, so he wasn’t a standout.
Blade and the Fierce Dogs were, as usual, functional villains. But, as usual, they don’t go much deeper than that. That’s ok with me though; not every villain needs to have a tragic backstory. And I really do like Blade’s weird obsession with the Growl and her conviction that killing Storm will prevent another one. She’s a more interesting villain than we usually get for sure.
Alpha continued to annoy the crap out of me though. While Blade is a pretty decent antagonist, he’s just such a mess of motivations and so consistently out-of-character that I’m not even sure what his character is supposed to be. Also, at the end the authors try to make it seem like he and Lucky have always been fated enemies, but that was not at all true. Lucky always disliked him. That is not the same as being destined to fight him. So Alpha was incredibly disappointing again; I don’t know why I’m surprised anymore. He might be one of the most inconsistent Erin characters; he’s definitely the most inconsistent in Survivors.
Overall, not the best arc finale the Erins have made, but definitely not the worst. I’m moving onto the novella collection next, so we’ll see if that changes any of my opinions on these characters.
SERIES RATINGS:
The Empty City: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A Hidden Enemy: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Darkness Falls: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Broken Path: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Endless Lake: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Storm of Dogs: ⭐️⭐️⭐️