United As One by Pittacus Lore (aka James Frey)

This is the seventh & last book in the Lorien Legacies series. I've talked about the plot before, so I won't go into that again.

I'm not sure when they revealed that James Frey was the actual author, but I'm a little bummed actually. I swore I'd never read anything by him and here I've gone & read a whole damn series. Freakin' pen names.

I was working at Borders when A Million Little Pieces came out. I gotta tell you, Oprah endorsing a book is fantastic for the author and for the stores, but it annoyed the shit out of me and my coworkers. People would come in asking for the Oprah book and we'd be sold out, natch, because everybody & their pet monkey watches Oprah. Then we'd get yelled at. Yay! So James Frey fits right into the annoying Oprah category. (BTW, I love Oprah. She just didn't give us any head start at the beginning.)

Then it came out it was all LIES! BLASPHEMER! To lie to Oprah?!? That's like ring 5 3/4 in Dante's Inferno, right?

But I digress.

The series was entertaining and the conclusion was satisfying. It makes me wonder why it didn't take off to the same degree as other YA series from the same time. The Twilight series started in 2005, Hunger Games in 2008, and the Divergent series in 2011. I Am Number Four, the first in the Lorien series, was published in 2010. All the others did well in the box office when their films were released, but Number Four fairly tanked. So I was thinking what was the difference? The three successful series focused on a few main characters. This series had eight main characters. The POV would shift between characters for each chapter, indicated by a font change. Honestly, that was hard to keep track of from book to book. Plus, they kept adding characters, although they were somewhat more minor than the originals. They had too many powers, and they kept adding more, so much so that this novel actually has an addition at the back that lists all the Legacies and who has them, because it's hard to remember. Lastly, there were seven novels in this series, while the others only had three, or four in the case of Twilight. I think that made it all a little too complicated and difficult to follow.

I don't think the series is bad; it was entertaining and was a really quick read, which is a positive for me. If it doesn't hold my attention I won't be able to finish at all. Considering all the negatives I've already talked about, they obviously weren't too much of a distraction. If you have the time and the interest, give 'em a try. They don't suck, but that's as good a review as I can give of them.