Ashleigh Paige

See more of my reviews on The YA Kitten! My copy was a hardcover I received from the publisher for review.

Very rarely does a series so completely change my mind as the Soul Seekers series had. Fated showed so much promise and yet failed to deliver on it, but Echo took some of those broken promises and mended them with Mystic doing more of the same. Horizon not only delivers the most promise of all four books but acts as a solid conclusion to a series full of diverse characters and a magic/mythos few others dare to try their hands at but that Noel uses well.

It's difficult to get a handle on these characters and their mindsets at first thanks to the unusually long six-month timeskip between the end of Mystic and the beginning of Horizon, but once Dace makes his move toward the side of the Richters for his own reasons, the heat is on and the book never slows down. Not even unnecessary chapters told from the POVs of Lita and Xotichl, whose voices often blend together with Daire's and Dace's because there isn't enough differentiation between them, are enough to stop the book from charging on toward the grand battle for Enchantment and the three worlds.

Something funny about this series is the fact Daire and her friends regularly bumble right into the enemy's hands, but they always win out in the end. There is usually some sacrifice, yes, but they come out surprisingly well for it and manage to just barely avoid defeat so they can keep fighting and keep good's light burning on. Just as it has happened in the last few books, it happens again here and Cade of all people is the one to help them achieve their victory this time. Let's just say Dace wasn't the only one affected by the piece of darkness he took from Cade.

The climactic fight takes up almost half the book, if you can believe it. And it works! That lengthy battle is exactly why the novel moves at such a breakneck pace. Once everyone slides their pieces into place and they go to the Rabbit Hole for the grand re-opening, all hell breaks loose as monsters come out to play and all three worlds are affected. So much of importance happens in all these pages that it's difficult to list them all! Then all that fighting and death turns into a happy ending for just about everyone who has earned it once the battle is over.

At first, the ending seems too sweet and HEA-ish. Good suffers few losses that mostly turn out to be Disney Deaths and they're going around claiming evil has been eradicated, which doesn't quite ring true with this series or with the entire structure of the good vs. evil battle the novel set u. Then one character walks in to remind us evil is far from gone and will never be gone because dark without light or light without dark is impossible. That law is why Daire exists, so it not applying to evil would be too disingenuous. This is the end of Daire's story, but this is far from the end of her work--and that is just how it should be on both counts. If you're willing to get through a bad first book to get to some really entertaining stuff, the Soul Seekers series will deliver on its promises.