"The Legendary Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

This guy knows how to end a series.

I mean, think about it. How should a series end? In my opinion, it's as follows: the author should tie up the outstanding plot threads (but not too neatly), the villains shouldn't get away with it, and the characters should finish their quests and get closure. And that's exactly what happens.

Scarlett |finds her missing brother|. Albert |gets to visit the ruins of the evil science institute he used to be imprisoned in|. I |redact a bunch of stuff behind spoiler bars|. The bad guys, |while not entirely defeated (this is not the sort of series where one topples an entire government), have at least been roundly smacked about|.

Oh, and we also get enough hints dropped about what happened before the apocalypse to figure out that it was probably |a nuclear war but with post-nuclear sci-fi weapons|. And honestly, that's all we need to know; it would have kind of messed with the book's pacing to suddenly get a giant lore dump on the subject.

I don't like this cover as much as I like the covers of the other two. It makes them look like kids. (Which I guess is because it is a middle-grade-to-YA series, but in the book, they're both like 18.) If there were an extant cover for this book that matched those, I'd use it; however, there doesn't seem to be, or if there is I can't find it.

As it turns out, I'm a bit of a sucker for post-apocalyptic things where |the old civilization had sci-fi tech and used it in a war, destroying itself|. Like, I even wrote one (that's the basic lore behind the world of my Ward-verse videogames).

There are some new villains in this. Well, I say "new"; they're really more like new enforcers for the old villains. They wear white bowler hats and are thus somewhat ironically called the White Hats, and they're somehow preternaturally good at fighting (like, snatch-a-throwing-knife-out-of-the-air good) and tough (like, survive-|getting-telekinetically-yeeted-halfway-across-a-city| tough). Plus they're armed with |pre-apocalypse weaponry| salvaged from |a pre-apocalypse bunker complex| the villains found.

The |previous book's villain|, Mallory, also |returns in this|; this may be due to Jonathan Stroud's seeming difficulty with |killing off characters|. Thankfully, despite |Mallory's edgy-psionic-boy| status, the narrative doesn't bend over backward to |accomodate him and make him look cool; he's lost most of his telepathic and telekinetic powers| thanks to getting |roundly defeated by Albert| in the previous book, and |he's actually kind of helpless| compared to Scarlett |(who's been surviving in the wilderness for years and knows how the world works)| and Albert |(who hasn't, but he has had two whole books of character development)|.

I could probably exposit for a while about how good a writer Jonathan Stroud is. He can plot. He has a way with words, especially dialogue, especially snappy and sarcastic dialog. He subverts expectations. And -- and this is probably the most important bit -- he doesn't put inappropriate content into his books.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for fight scenes and some bad language.

4 stars.

(Endnote: If I had a nickel for every time I've read a YA or YA-ish series where the villains wore bowler hats and were named after them, I'd have two nickels, one from this and one from Vega Jane. That isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.)