Title: Gregor and the Code of Claw
Author: Suzanne Collins
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 328
Rating: 4/5
This book is the final book in Collins’ Gregor series, and I thought it did a pretty good job of tying up all of the loose ends.
Even before you start reading it, you know you’re in for a big old battle because of the way that the fourth book ended. It almost felt as though the two of them were a single book that had been split in two for publication, but that was fine by me.
The interesting thing about this one is that it does a bit of a bait and switch, so it sets it up as though you’re going into the big battle and then Gregor heads away from it. Then the city gets attacked and we get the big showdown that we’ve waited for.
While all of this is going on, we get some tasty character development along with the end of the arcs that Collins has spent five books working on. We even get a resolution to the love story between Luxa and Gregor, along with a kiss or two and an admission of love. But that felt kind of weird to me given that they’re both 12-years-old or so.
Then we have the final ending, which reminded me a little bit of the ending to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s kind of bittersweet, but it’s also the only ending that there could have been.
All in all, it was a decent ending to a pretty decent series, and while it was nowhere near as good as The Hunger Games, it was also a very different kind of read. I also liked how it got darker as the series progressed, and it even did a pretty good job of introducing kids to the concept of death. Dark, perhaps, but also necessary.
