This the concluding installment of the Extinction of All Children Trilogy. I found that this novel is stronger than the second novel, but not as strong as the first.
The world-building that was there was solid. There was also room for more of it in order to truly flesh out the universe and make it feel real.
The character building could have been improved. As I mentioned in my review of the second installment, the choice to use a first-person perspective does hinder this. Still, I think there was plenty of room to make the characters less one-dimensional and to provide them with some ambiguity (after all, good intentions lead to bad outcomes, just as selfish intentions can lead to positive outcomes). Furthermore, despite all that Emma witnessed and experienced, she doesn't really grow and change as a character. (I can say, from personal experience, that losing a parent - sans being a rebel-heroine trying to overthrow a corrupt regime - changed me permanently. It was only after about 5 years that I started to feel somewhat myself again. Between all the losses Emma suffers, I can't see any way that she wouldn't evolve, and yet, she reads consistently all the way through the novels).
The pacing of the story was generally good. I did feel that the final action scene needed work. The writing was very choppy and matter of fact (He did this. She did that. I tried to do this). The repetitive sentence length and structure rendered this, frankly, boring to read.
I found that, while the epilogue provided all of the major (and some minor) characters' circumstances, these were not always in line with the tone of the novel, and didn't really make sense to me given the outcome of the main story.
There were also plenty of mistakes in this novel: plurals and possessives were confused, there were errors of logic (you can't really bleed to death immediately - bleeding to death, by definition, takes some time: usually minutes), misused words (stature instead of status), and so on. I think that fixing these up, as well as varying the sentence structures and length would really have helped this novel.
There were some really interesting themes presented, but I didn't feel that any of them was given its due treatment. The one theme that stood out as being poorly handled was that of race. Emma was convinced that her bi-racial status was part of the reason she was treated differently, but I didn't ever encounter any evidence as to why she would hold this belief, let alone how she came to be aware that might be a consideration at all. It seemed that Emma was the only character that cared about race (she describes characters as light-skin or dark-skin). Had Territory L been nearly exclusively brown people, or had officials at various levels used racial language, I think this theme would have fared more successfully. In its current treatment, it came across as a weird sort of after-thought that neither enriched the plot nor was a pointed criticism of current societal practises.
Overall, I was really intrigued by the premise of this story, but I didn't feel that this trilogy ever really reached its potential, which is a shame.