Execution: Escape from Furnace 5
By
Alexander Gordon Smith
My time with the Furnace series is
finally over.
I wasn’t sure I could make it, but I had
to know if Gordon Smith would ever resolve this strange, twisting plot.
In the end… yeah, I suppose he did.
All of my previous issues still stand but
this book was at least interesting- I was never totally sure about what was
going to happen and, while it isn’t where I would have taken the plot or
premise, I think, for the direction he chose to go, the end made sense.
I definitely hated the military twist
present in the last two books- a twist that basically gnarled itself into such cliché
stupidity that I wanted to punch myself in the face. There was also a lot of
cheese--- I mean (and this will only make sense to people who have read these
books), what the hell is going on with Alex’s obsession with Donovan? They knew
each other for a hot minute: they had some interesting conversations, shared
some laughs, Donovan gave him a tour of
the prison and tried to stop him from getting his ass beaten, and Alex
smothered him to death with a pillow … but my god, it was seriously only a
couple weeks. I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it. Alex, I think you have
crossed the line from honoring a dead pal (and I say pal because buddy, friend,
companion and other like terms would indicate that they had known each other
for at least a month--- which they did not) to basically being a ghost stalker.
That might be a weird tangent, but it
annoyed me.
I couldn’t decide if I liked the Alfred
Furnace reveal or if I thought it was stupid.
In the end, that’s basically how I feel
about this entire series. Was it good for what it was or was it crap? Was I blinded
by my literary scholarliness or was I trying to force something that just wasn’t
there? I don’t know. I plan on using aspects for my dissertation, but that has
more to do with offensive representations of mental illness than it has to do
with this being quality young-adult lit.
All I can say is, if you are going to
start the first book, you might as well take it to the end so that you can form
a well-rounded final judgment.
My final judgment: meh.
