Eliyana Ember is a reluctant queen. As vessel of the Verity—the purest of souls—only she can lead the fight against the wicked magnetism of the Void. If she fails, the paths between Reflections will cease to exist, and those she loves will remain plagued by darkness.

After falling through a draining Threshold and suffering near-death, Eliyana awakens to a Shadowalker-ridden Venice, Italy. From there, she must learn to navigate mysteries of time and space. Traveling across the seven Reflections, Eliyana seeks one thing: the demise of the Void.

But something else is at stake—the fate of her heart. Kyaphus Rhyen and Joshua David, brothers in arms, duel to win her hand. Ky remains ensnared and tortured by the Void. Joshua, though well-meaning, harbors dark secrets. Meanwhile, Eliyana finds herself torn, her mind and memories leading her in one direction, but her heart pulling her toward a man she knows she shouldn’t trust.

How can she discern whom to believe when she cannot even depend on her own fragmented memories?

Traversing the realms of fantasy and reality through a labyrinth of plot twists, Unbreakable delivers a thrilling conclusion to Sara Ella’s Unblemished Trilogy.

I have been sooooo excited for this book to come out that I couldn’t wait to start reading it! I read the first two books in the series (Unblemished and Unraveling) when they came out, so I wasn’t going to miss Unbreakable!

Before I begin my review, please note: You need to re-read at least Unraveling (if not both books) before you start the third; I jumped right in and wish I hadn’t — I had a hard time remembering everything, which made it confusing. I am not basing my review on this, though. It’s just a suggestion for others so you’ll have an easier time reading the final book.

Okay, here’s the truth: I wanted to like this book — I reeeeaaaalllly wanted to — but I just could not get into it and found it to be sadly anticlimactic. The time frame of this book is literally less than a week (most of the book takes place over just a few days), but it takes hundreds of pages to get through those days.

It’s not like those days are action-packed either. It’s essentially the characters spending three days thinking. There’s so much thinking. They think about each other, they think about their pasts, they think about what they’ll do when they reunite. And then when they actually reunite (the whole point of the story!), there are a couple of chapters to wrap everything up. All of the thinking about how they can’t live without each other and then about a paragraph describing their reunion.

Another issue for me was the character names. This saga is complex and long (which is why you should re-read books one and two before you start three), but it’s made unnecessarily more complex by the fact that all of the main characters have multiple names. It makes it even harder to remember who’s doing what and why.

Unfortunately, it was easy for me to put this book down and walk away. My initial excitement just got lost in the slow pace and all of the thinking. My gut feeling about this is that Ella fell victim to publishing deadlines — you have years and years and years to perfect your first novel, then 12-24 months each for the follow-ups. I’ve seen this several times with series books. (I could be wrong, it’s just a theory.) Ella is clearly a talented writer, but this book isn’t the best example of it.

Overall, I give this 2.5 (maybe 3) out of 5 stars (it was okay, but if it hadn’t wrapped up the series, I don’t know that I would have finished it).

*I received a free copy of this book. The opinions are my own.