My last book of the year has been a long time coming as December got on top of me. After maintaining a decent rate for most of the year I had a real reading slow down in the last month. This was my present for Jólabókaflóðið and it was just what I needed to get my reading mojo back. Plus the break and the time to read didn’t hurt!

Not that it’s a nice book or an easy one to read. By this point - the third of a four book series - I’m expecting the sexual abuse theme that’s been a factor in both of the previous books. And I knew that Freya, who briefly appeared as a juror in the trial detailed in Earth was going to be the main character. But I really didn’t expect the line that this book took, and was pretty shocked by it. These are short books but there’s a lot in them. I often get annoyed with short stories and novellas for not filling in enough details or stopping short of the complicated bits but this just feels the right length and there’s no skimping on the background or the details. The story is well told and I want to think it’s unrealistic but I suspect the author knows his stuff and it’s not. I don’t want to spoil it so I won’t detail it any further. (I also thought when reading the earlier books that they could be read out of order, but there are definitely spoilers for Earth in here.)

It’s taken me until I saw, in this book’s endpapers, the name of the lead character in the last volume, Air, to realise that the title characters share their initials with the books. There’s Willow in Water as well as Evan in Earth, and knowing whose story is coming up next has me wondering where that book will take us. In Fire there’s a link back to the characters in Water but I don’t feel like the series is going to be completely circular.

There’s part of me that feels that this series of four short and linked books might really have been a single long book; but there’s something about having to wait for the next installment and come back after a little time has passed that makes you think so I can’t begrudge the author or his publisher for the moneyspinning lark of publishing them as four separate volumes really. Air is top of my reading list for 2025.