Praiseworthy Pages

Reader Rating: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ (4/5 stars)

This final installment of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy did not go the way I thought it would go, and actually, I loved that. I think that a lot of literature these days relies too heavily on the idea of a “happy ending” where the hero saves the day, the love interests get together and live happily ever after, etc., and while that ending definitely has its place, it’s not always realistic. Characters can have happy endings in other, more subtle ways, and I loved that Death’s End captured the beauty of a happy ending without everything resolving in away readers would commonly expect.

While this book did not astound me as much as the first two novels in the series did, I do think that it completed the trilogy beautifully. The ending is almost artistic in its simplicity, and I loved how so many little details all came together like individual threads in one magnificent tapestry. It’s a book and a series I can see myself returning to over and over again.

Language: 6.5/10 (Occasional swearing).
Sex: 10/10 (No sexual content).
Violence and gore: 6/10 (PG action movie, not detailed or extensive).

Plot: 9/10 (Okay, so the plot of this final novel is a little more jumbled than the previous two. I think the author is justified to have left it in the state it’s in. The book covers a lot of time, a lot of ground, and births so many new ideas; I can see how that might be difficult to juggle. I think he juggled it well, overall).
Characters: 8.5/10 (The first two books had almost “stock” characters in that it sometimes felt they existed only to receive the effects of the story’s plot. I loved that in this final novel, the characters have a little more life to them, and their choices influence a lot of how the story played out).
Writing style: 6/10 (The writing style of this novel did suffer slightly more than in the previous books, and I think that has to do with the fact that the plot plodded along a bit more clunkily than its predecessors. That combined with the fact that the novel is a translation into English from Chinese caused me to stumble a bit more when it came to enjoying the style).

Genre: Adult literature, new adult literature, science fiction
Potential triggers: Murder, genocide, loss of loved ones, etc.
Is this book part of a series? Yes.
I would recommend this book to readers aged 18+.