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I'm going to start off by saying that Hourglass is by far the best book in the series so far. While I definitely enjoyed Evernight and Stargazer, Hourglass surpassed the first two books in the series by leaps and bounds. If you stick around, I'm going to try to explain why.

First of all, the characters are much more complex. While this might be because of the background and development established by the first two books, Claudia Gray definitely showed what she can do with a pen in Hourglass. The main characters are faced with even more difficult decisions, and they don't always make the choices you'd expect them to. I've always loved it when an author manages to throw me for a loop, and this happened a few times in this book.

Second, the secondary characters were more fleshed out. We get to see more of Vic, Dana, Raquel, and Ranulf--including some things that I didn't see coming. For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know that for me, characters make the book, and in Hourglass, the loveable lead characters of Bianca and Lucas are supported by a cast of complex, well-developed minor characters.

Furthermore, the entire book was emotionally charged. Anger, happiness, fear, grief, confusion--pretty much every emotion you could imagine was somehow included. I even shed a tear during one scene, and that's rare coming from me. The emotions were real, and they helped me to connect to the characters and identify with their situation, which is important in a series that focuses on the supernatural.

Finally, I was impressed with where Gray took the series. After Stargazer, I was expecting to get shorted out on the wraith problem, by which I mean that I thought we'd get a kind of "wimpy" resolution. I've found that, in many series, other supernatural creatures are brought into the books just to make them more action-driven. I was expecting this to happen in Hourglass, but I was happily proven wrong.

I don't know what I'm going to do waiting for the fourth book. The ending of Hourglass was awesome, but it left the characters in such a predicament that I'm wanting to beat down the author's door and demand the manuscript for the fourth book.