Wow! This book is amazing. The twists and turns were completely unexpected and I found the characters absolutely compelling. Even the villains whose points of view I often gloss over were absolutely fascinating!
Tristan, oh where to begin. His story is absolutely heartbreaking and the more I read and the further I got with the wonderfully tantalizing hints and possibilities, the worse it got. I rarely get emotional when reading, but Lorensen definitely sent me for a loop with the ending. It was truly cathartic but also so, so powerful.
The themes in For Evergreens and Aspen Trees are really powerful ones and, as someone who's never fitted in wherever I go, they truly resonated. Tristan suffers from amnesia after damage to the head taken in battle, so the main focus is on memory and finding oneself. The crew of fabulous characters who join his cause (mostly by accident) were also wonderful and added the dimension of found family and "re-found" family, if you will. None of them belong, so it's a wonderful rag-tag group of misfits all trying to make the best of a terrible hand dealt.
The pacing was also really well done. Amnesia stories have a tendency to be super slow paced, but this one isn't. It started off gently enough, but got pretty intense really quickly and simply didn't let up. It's a great thing I started this on the eve of my summer vacation (and the weather happens to be awful). There was absolutely no reason for me to delay and I simply devoured this book as fast as I possibly could. And it didn't disappoint.
On the whole, as I read it, it was a good book, but wow did that ending blow it all out of the water! (and there's a pun in there if you take a moment to read this fantastic book, which has some very interesting naiads and a battle and all in the midst of rapids and evil soul-sucking plants - and I'm hoping more will be revealed about the lore of all of that in the next book because darn was I kept wanting on that point). But puns aside... this book's ending is absolutely ASTOUNDING! It took something I liked and transmuted it into absolute love! And now I'm obsessed. So, with bated breath, I await the next book which I see will be released in October. Yay! That's not so far away.
