The toll by Neil Shusterman
Hello Books Lovers,
just yesterday the last, much awaited, third volume of the trilogy started with Scythe (each trilogy of the Vault is coming to an end) was released, followed by Thunderhead and now concluded with The toll, as always a very indicative title on the content of the volume, indeed more than the content is very indicative of the main subject of the volume itself.
But I have to give you the bad news right away, this is the volume that I liked least. The judgment for me was starting to turn negative already from the second volume if you remember my review. There are now too many characters, too many points of view in the same chapter that make you lose the thread of the main discourse, there are even more from the second volume. Rowan and Citra, who were initially the main characters, have now become some of the main characters and this bothered me a little while reading.
But we are at the end, the events are about to end and, as I said before, the title is very indicative, because the toll is a person, an individual in close contact with the Thunderhead, he knows everything, he knows everyone and nothing escapes him. He appears almost halfway through the book, first giving space to the other characters so as to inform us and catch up on where we were left, arriving 3 years after the end of the events of the first volume.
The first volume ended with Citra and Rowan locked up in a sunken bunker. From here it will be discovered that this third volume is set three years later, because Citra was dead for 3 years. But the real problem lies in the fact that finally Master Goddard, despite all the efforts that the characters have made to stop him, giving their own life several times, has managed to become supreme bill hook, and is now in command of a large fraction of Scythes.
The Thunderhead has now been destroyed and this is where the aforementioned toll comes into play, the one who still has a reminiscence of what the Thunderhead actually was. From here, more or less from pages 90/100, the plot will be all the way up, with a return of the action, with the aim of all our good characters to sort things out.
I tell you the truth despite not having appreciated how things have evolved in terms of prose in the three books, and as I had already told you several times previously, I liked the underlying plot of this third volume a lot, it is a beautiful adventure, a beautiful dystopian world created by the author as beautiful as a dystopia can be. Having said that, however, I invite you to also read the reviews of the other blogs that participated in this event because I saw that many appreciated the trilogy much more than me, it is always nice to read different opinions.
