The Gathering by Kelley Armstrong

A Spoiler Free Review

After reading the Darkest Powers Trilogy, The Gathering was a breath of fresh air. That said, it’s definitely more up the alley of a CW show than it is anything else. There’s just a lot of teen drama. Not especially boring but also not especially engaging, either. I won’t say I was bored at any point while I was reading, but I also don’t really remember a lot of the details.

I thought Maya was a satisfactory protagonist. She’s spunky, has an actual personality, and is grounded as a person. The other characters are honestly blurs, in my brain. I remember the secondary characters — Daniel and Rafe — of course, but most of the others… nothing interesting pops up. They’re there to fill out Maya’s world and they do that well.

It is a little interesting to have a completely outside perspective on the St. Cloud Cabal. And by outside, I mean human. Having read other books set in Armstrong’s Otherworld, I know who the St. Clouds really are, even if their aims are beyond me, and Maya, at this point in the Darkness Rising trilogy. Of course, the mention of Dr. Davidoff from the Darkest Powers trilogy made me roll my eyes. But he’s only mentioned in this book so… yeah. Not a big thing.

I’m not normally a fan of abrupt endings. In fact, I never picked up any of the Divergent series after the first one because of this. However, I’m going to continue with the Darkness Rising trilogy, mainly because I know it’s a trilogy and I like the author. But yeah, do be warned, it just ends out of nowhere.

I would also like to mention that I read the "Enhanced Edition" on Kindle. It's got a couple little short stories that sort of flesh out a couple things from the book and a yearbook section and character profiles. I probably would have eaten this up if I were younger, but... yeah. That's definitely stuff for a younger audience than my 33 yrs.