Locklands | Book 3 of The Founders | ARC Review | Social Media Blast

Thank you to Jo Fletcher Books and Netgalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest opinion. This does not change my opinion in anyway.

 Book: Locklands (Founders 3) by Robert Jackson Bennett
Release Date: June 28th 2022
Tags: Fantasy | Adult | Epic Fantasy | Friendship | Family | War
Trigger/Content Warnings: Talk of loss of limb | War Depictions | Wide Spread Death
Other books in this series I reviewed
Foundryside | Shorefall

A god wages war—using all of humanity as its pawns—in the unforgettable conclusion to the Founders trilogy.

Sancia, Clef, and Berenice have gone up against plenty of long odds in the past. But the war they’re fighting now is one even they can’t win.

This time, they’re not facing robber-baron elites, or even an immortal hierophant, but an entity whose intelligence is spread over half the globe—a ghost in the machine that uses the magic of scriving to possess and control not just objects, but human minds.

To fight it, they’ve used scriving technology to transform themselves and their allies into an army—a society—that’s like nothing humanity has seen before. With its strength at their backs, they’ve freed a handful of their enemy’s hosts from servitude, even brought down some of its fearsome, reality-altering dreadnaughts. Yet despite their efforts, their enemy marches on—implacable. Unstoppable.

Now, as their opponent closes in on its true prize—an ancient doorway, long buried, that leads to the chambers at the center of creation itself—Sancia and her friends glimpse a chance at reaching it first, and with it, a last desperate opportunity to stop this unbeatable foe. But to do so, they’ll have to unlock the centuries-old mystery of scriving’s origins, embark on a desperate mission into the heart of their enemy’s power, and pull off the most daring heist they’ve ever attempted.

And as if that weren’t enough, their adversary might just have a spy in their ranks—and a last trick up its sleeve.

In the last few years one of my absolute favorite books has been Foundryside. So it is with a fondness and a bit of sadness that I read this book, knowing I had to say goodbye to this world and characters. I loved Foundryside and Shorefall and so it was hard for this book to live up to that. It didn’t. Not quite. But it is still a good conclusion to this trilogy.

Locklands starts us off 8 years after the end of Shorefall. The ending of that book changed their whole world and so the setting of our characters completely changed. No more was there Tevanne or the Houses. But a war where Sancia, Berenice and Cleff have founded an island group to keep them and the survivors safe. It gives us a very different feeling than the two other books did.

Added to that I missed Gregor and Orso. My heart aches for them. It cut our fivesome in half and I feel like we missed a lot of the interactions that those 5 had together. They were the heart to this whole thing for me and having lost them, it lost something of that to me. No matter how much I love Sancia and Cleff. The new adds just didn’t feel the same because we didn’t have the same history with them.

There is also the downside that I feel a bit dissapointed in who our actual enemy is. It didn’t quite feel right somehow.

Having said all of that however, Locklands is still a great book. These are my nit pickings. There is still a lot of adventure and scriving to be had. Berenice and Sancia carry this book on their back and saving the world in a great way. Their love and strength were so great to read about.