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Sorry, I tried, but I just don’t get the appeal. I’ve heard lots of good things ever since Unearthly and I certainly understand the praise - in an angel paranormal landscape littered with train wrecks like Silence, Halo, and Hush, Hush, Boundless is far from terrible. Still, when I’m looking at the story, all I see are the same generic concepts as pretty much every other book in the genre, just better done. That’s great for people who actually enjoy reading about romantic woes, love triangles, and a smidge of plotting just so we can say there’s a story beyond just the romance, but I don’t think I can ever get beyond the fact that this is still really just a romance masquerading as an angel plot.

And ultimately, that's my problem. Say what you will about how great Boundless is, but, at the end of the day, it still has more in common with its oft ridiculed peers than with a true angel book. Sure, the girl is a little less angsty and not quite so insecure, the love triangle isn't nauseatingly vomitrocious, and the plot is a bit more than just your average good versus evil angels capped off by your typical fight to stave off the end of the world as we know it, but in the end Boundless is still working with the same ingredients that made all those other angel books 'bad' - can I really say this is 'good' when it's the book equivalent of making the same shitty stew but using slightly better quality ingredients? Why does Clara have to spend fully half the book doing random college stuff with Christian while her father conveniently withholds the vital stuff that moves the plot along in the second half until the midway point of the book? Why does she spend so much time obsessing over her failed relationship with Tucker to the point the actual plot involving the threat to her life feels more like a minor inconvenience? Why does the climax of this book fail as much as Unearthly - when Clara basically just ripped off some dude's ear? If I can make a comparison to Heaven, another angel book with a superficially similar plot, yeah, at least Hand's protagonist isn't shallow or sanctimonious and her depictions of college life aren’t nearly as laughable, but when all’s said and done I don’t think there’s really anything here I haven’t seen before there.

Actually, maybe there is one thing, something that's bothered me ever since Unearthly - Hand's excessive use of foreshadowing. Part of it, Clara's vision starting out the prologue and the rest of the book being her trying to figure out her purpose and the end revealing how her initial vision worked out, well, that I get is the hook of the series and have no problems with, but it seems to me like Hand enjoys revealing things with basically the writing equivalent of 'see, see, here's a detail that's going to be important later, so I'm going to make it so obvious you HAVE to notice it' - there was the color of Jeffrey's wings the last two books, and this time around, all the stuff about how something is going on with Angela. But you know what? After all the foreshadowing, you don't just reveal exactly what I've been expecting based on all the hints marked by the big neon signs, otherwise the reveal just becomes anticlimatical, and anticlimatical reveals are boring. My reaction before reading this book was seriously 'you can't muck up the last book in the series with excessive foreshadowing, can you?' - and somehow, I was still bored, because Hand really doesn't deliver with the 'is Jeffrey good or evil because of the color of his wings' plot she's got going on for two books now, THAT was textbook anticlimatical, and Angela's storyline really wasn't any better. I don't think I learned anything about how her relationship with Phen evolves devolves after what happened.

The worst thing by far though, is the love triangle. I'm sure that's a bonus for lots of people, but for me, it's a massive detriment. Why? I don't get the appeal of Tucker. He's just a cowboy who can't do anything because everyone else has angel powers, so Clara's relationship with him is basically 'she's out saving the world while he's back at the ranch doing... manly things?' - so I see all my friends rooting for Tucker and I'm like, 'umm why?' because he comes dangerously close through most of the book of falling into the useless love interest trap, and I have no patience with useless characters. Then again, even though Christian does things, I don't like him either, but at least there I'm not alone. For me, the only thing the triangle does is give a license for all these characters to act like jerks whenever it's brought it, and why is that a good thing? And the other thing about love triangles is that you have to write the ending a certain way, otherwise you piss off your fanbase, so while I think many many people will be very happy after reading the ending - even if many others will be disappointed, it doesn't really make much sense. Not spoiling it, but the whole point of Clara's triangle dilemma is left unresolved except for a massive deus ex machina delivered by Uriel.

Yeah, basically, I'm thankful this series is over because I'm not the kind of guy who enjoys reading about people bitching about their love lives for most of a book that's nominally supposed to be about conflict between Heaven and Hell. A conflict that's not even well done thanks to all the huge hints scattered throughout that left me five steps ahead of Clara and company the entire time.