"Ember's End" by S. D. Smith

I probably should have reread Ember Rising before reading this, because it's been almost a year and a half and I forgot like half the plot.

Much of the book is consumed with the final battle against The Evil Bird Dude and his Evil Bird Dudes (and also The Evil Bird Army, The Other Six Evil Bird Armies, The Evil Wolf Army, The Evil Wolf Army II: Wolf Army Boogaloo, and The Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once). My thoughts on that will follow.

I found it a tad unrealistic how we were like "oh, this is too much, we're out of reserves and weapons and couldn't survive another attack" after the attack of about every other army, then always managed to come up with more reserves and weapons for the next one. It strains my credulity.

(Note: "The Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once" is because earlier in the series, a bunch of rabbits had betrayed the other rabbits and gone to work for the Evil Bird Dude (whose name is Morbin Blackhawk, but I'm just going to keep calling him the Evil Bird Dude). Then, in this book, the good rabbits manage to convince some of the traitor rabbits to be traitors a second time, betray the bad guys, and go back to being good guys. But not all of them did; some stayed behind, hence the Rabbit Traitors Who Were Only Traitors Once.)

Oh, and the gunpowder use is still all out of whack. They have exploding arrowheads now, but still no, y'know, firearms. Or (as has been my perennial refrain for the reviews of pretty much the entire series) landmines. Seriously, the amount of explosives you can pack into a rabbit-scale arrowhead is puny; if you don't have modern high explosives you'll make a loud bang and possibly a flash, and that's it.

(If you did have modern high explosives, I'm not entirely sure you could have any more success at making an effective weapon. An arrowhead--even a human-scale one--is just too small a space to pack a detonator and any reasonable amount of explosive into without making it too heavy to use. I guess maybe if you made an arrowhead out of pure sodium and shot it into water or something? Humans do make explosive harpoons for whaling, though I'm not sure why, but a human-scale harpoon is at least an order of magnitude bigger than a rabbit-scale arrow.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence. I'm not entirely sure what genre of videogame this would fall into.

4 stars.

(Endnote: They're rabbits. With swords. And increasingly unrealistic and idiosyncratic other weapons. And also hang gliders.)