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"Welcome to the Blackbeaks."

This series keeps surprising me. I loved how improved the third books was, but this fourth books was well beyond my wildest expectations. Plot, world building, character development, adventure, humor, politics, and anything else you could think of, each reaches a near perfect level in Queen of Shadows. As always, the first half build-up leads to a thrilling second half, that felt more like the final book of a series, than one of the middle installments. I'm having a hard time imagining remaining ones surpassing this book: Maas does everything correctly here. If you're one of many who gave up on this series because of the first two books, you are missing out on an amazing journey.

"Celaena Sardothien doesn't exist anymore."

While we still have most of the original gang, the author keeps on introducing new, interesting characters with each book. And the best thing is, all these new characters are turning out to be even better than the main ones. Manon and Rowan quickly replaced everyone else as my favorites by the end of this book, and I'm really hoping Maas would not kill them off in near future. When she must have chaos -which would be inevitable in next three books- I'm willing to loose one of the older main characters instead of those two. But I might be getting ahead of myself.

Plot-wise, there's a lot happening here. Pretty much all the loose threads are tied up by the end of this book. If it wasn't for a couple of major bad guys remaining, it's easier to imagine this book turning out to be the end of the series. The last quarter was so eventful, and unpredictable, leading up to probably the best ending I've encountered in this series so far. I'm also finding those adventure elements to be quite enjoyable, adding a nice bit of variety to the usual flow with politics, scheming and romance.

"Backs straight, shoulders back, necks uplifted. You are light you are air, you are grace."

It's not easy to give a 'right' ending to a book like this. If everything goes perfectly, you end up making the ending unrealistic, or make things go very badly by killing some of the good guys, you end up depressing and disappointing a lot of readers. Even though the ending here was a little towards the former, I liked how things turned out at the end. It's really nice of Maas to maintain a perfect balance between victory and defeat without major causalities to the good guys. Though, it's possible that this might be the only happy ending we'll have for a while. 4.5 stars. I'm loving this series!

"And at long last, Aelin Ashryver Galathynius was home."