Endgame: Book Review!

About the book: This summer I read, Endgame: rules of the game. This is the third book in the trilogy of the endgame series. In book 1 Endgame arrived. Makers had came down on this earth millions of years ago and promised they would come back one day, forcing each of the twelve lines to select a "player" to fight in the Endgame. To win Endgame, the player must find 3 keys, Earth Key, Sky Key, and Sun Key. The loser faces death. Each book in the trilogy is for one key. Starting off with twelve players, they each get a clue as to where the first key is, all are experts in killing, weaponry, and various strategic skills. There can only be one winner, and the loser's fate is death. Only the line of the winner survives while the rest will face the same punishment as their respective player. During the game there is alliances, love, betrayal and lots and lots of death. I heed warning to anyone who is interested in this series because below is MAJOR SPOILERS.
Click here for Endgame: The Calling Book trailer

  

While I found that that all three books were very good, and intriguing, there was one main issue that bothered me about the ending. So first things first, I am in total favor of the bittersweet ending. I don't like how good wins out and all the good guys survive and live happily ever after. But effectively having a bittersweet ending is hard to accomplish, because the line is fine between, "Wow, I knew that was happening the whole time," and, "What the heck? I read all that just for them all to die!?!" While I am in no way bashing the author or his style, I do think James Frey overshot the mark a little bit.

Now the real spoilers start, so if you kept reading this is your last chance to back away before the book is ruined for you.

In the Endgame novels, the author doesn't really pick a main character, which is fine and gave the book an interesting structure. However, throughout the series one character stands above the rest and while not my favorite, seemed to get the most chapters, backstory, and focus. This character was Sarah Allopay. Time after time, my favorites got picked off, but Sarah was always a "hero." She teamed up with Jago Tlaloc, and the two fell in love. Sarah however, after killing someone she held dear (her old boyfriend,) fell into a deep self conflict in book one. Through all of book two and most of book 3 she battled through this conflict she put herself into and the love story between Jago and Sarah got more and more defined. And with about 50 pages left in the whole series she finally figures everything out and is finally happy with her life. This lasted until there were about 49 pages left, and she and Jago were killed by a sniper bullet. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I read two books nearly centered around a personal struggle, and just when her conflict is resolved she gets killed, un...believable. 

Now I see where James Frey comes from, he decides killing the semi-main character and the love story of the books was much, so he decides to give Sarah closure before ending her with a shot from An Liu's gun, because that's life. He figures that the rest of the book won't be too happy if he kills off Sarah. But that just didn't give me the bittersweet ending I was looking for and kind of ruined the rest of the book for me.

 When it first happened Frey didn't definitively say that Sarah was dead and I refused to believe it. It didn't make sense, when does an author kill his main character? I proceeded to flip through the pages in disbelief looking for a chapter to be titled after her and to my dismay, there wasn't. Throughout the rest of the book, I couldn't stop replaying the line, "she didn't even hear the shot coming." For me, it took the rest of the book away and I didn't really take in or appreciate the rest of it. I say all this as many angry book fans do, but I don't have an answer as to what a better ending could've been. Because I don't want to read what I expected, the happy ending, but I also don't want the good guys to lose and the earth to be destroyed, the sad ending. So maybe the ending James Frey came up with was fine, maybe it wasn't the perfect bittersweet ending but maybe that's not what Frey wanted. He wanted to reinforce the idea that Endgame meant death, which made this perhaps the perfect ending for his book. And if it wasn't, this blog post most certainly would not have been about a book I loved so much. So maybe that line that I will never shake out of my head, the image of all the bodies stacked on top of each other was exactly what a bittersweet ending should be. Graphic sad, but at the same time resolved. I think, the real reason I'm upset is that an ending at all, the action the adventure all built up to a thrilling conclusion and that was it. The end. All the build up and drama and the resolution and then the end. And while you're glad to see what happened, you hate to see it over. And that's the real reason why readers like me are never happy with the ending of a book. But that's life I guess.