Title: The Worlds We Make Series: Fallen World #3
Author: Megan Crewe
Published: February 11, 2014
Genre(s): Science Fiction
Page Count: 288
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:When Kaelyn and her friends reached Toronto with a vaccine for the virus that has ravaged the population, they thought their journey was over. But now they're being tracked by the Wardens, a band of survivors as lethal as the virus who are intent on stealing the vaccine no matter what the cost.
Forced onto the road again, Kaelyn and her companions discover the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta is their best hope for finding scientists who can reproduce the vaccine. But with the virus already spreading among them, the Wardens hot on their trail, and hundreds of miles to cross, Kaelyn finds herself compromising her morals to keep her group alive. Her conscience seems a small price to pay if protects them and their precious cargo. Unless even that is not enough...
In the final installment in Megan Crewe’s captivating the Fallen World trilogy, Kaelyn is on the run from her biggest adversaries yet. While she continues to face horrific loss, her resolve is still strong. But to survive this shattered world, will she have to sacrifice all that's left of the girl she was?
And so with The Worlds We Make, another series comes to a close. It was a nice, satisfying conclusion that wrapped up the major plotline while still leaving other things open. However, nice ending aside, I don’t really see this book as being very successful. The concluding installment in a post-apocalyptic series should be highly-charged and moving; here, I just felt that everything was a little bland.
The book opens with Kaelyn’s boyfriend dying, which is a pretty strange way to start things, in my opinion. It’s even stranger because Crewe didn’t spend much time focusing on the death, instantly moving on with things without really portraying how troubling this death was for Kaelyn. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter in the end, because 200 pages later, we have a new love interest on the scene, who I feel about as dispassionate towards as the first love interest’s death. And that right there is probably the crux of my issues with The Worlds We Make. The book just didn’t impact or interest me at all.
The story felt rushed, for one thing. The book is less than 300 pages, which is pretty short, so there was kind of a lot going on, and Crewe just skimmed over events without going in depth with any particular aspect. For instance, a lot of characters close to Kaelyn died in this book, but I didn’t even care because their killings were pretty perfunctory and emotionless as presented in the text. I didn’t feel their loss.
At the same time, when you really look at the text, there isn’t all that much going on in The Worlds We Make. Kaelyn and the Scooby Gang are still headed south to the CDC in Atlanta. There’s still somebody trying to stop them from getting there. I feel like this was just a repeat experience of book 2, only even less exciting because it wasn’t new.
I just, honestly, didn’t see anything remarkable in The Worlds We Make. Megan Crewe’s prose wasn’t memorable, and the rushed, shallow story was underwhelming at best. Like so many series I’ve experienced, the Fallen World Trilogy ends not with a bang but with a whimper.
