Review: Last Sacrifice, Richelle Mead

This is the sixth and final book in the current Vampire Academy series, and this review WILL contain spoilers for the first five. If you’re new to the series, read my review of Vampire Academy.

The stakes have never been higher for Rose and her friends. Rose is in prison, accused of murdered Queen Tatiana, and with the evidence against her, will almost undoubtedly be convicted and sentenced to death. The court itself is in turmoil over Tatiana’s death, still over Dimitri’s restoration to Moroi from Strigoi, and over turning dhampirs into guardian at just sixteen, instead of eighteen. A new monarch must be chosen for the Moroi world and the choices aren’t stellar. Rose must escape and find the real murderer before it’s too late.

While I enjoyed this final installment in the series, I have to say that it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d expected it to be. In large part, I suspect this is because the Vampire Academy universe will be continued in the future. Rose’s story is wrapped up, but the author has a lot of loose threads to tie together at the end. I wasn’t particularly pleased with how things went with Lissa and Jill, for example, and especially not with what happened with Adrian. We’re just left with a lot of questions and not as many answers as I’d have expected. What did happen was mostly what I expected to happen, regardless of what I actually wanted. Suffice it to say that this was enjoyable, but not my favorite of the lot. Okay, I’ll be including spoilers now, as I just can’t hold back!

What’s worse is that I wasn’t entirely sure I liked Rose at the end of the book. At one point, Adrian tells her that she’s hurt a lot of feelings and used a lot of people to get to the end, and I had to agree with him. She does use people, she gets them into trouble, and she has the ability to ruin lives. I actually would have been happier had the ending gone a different way – I hated how she treated Adrian, who I thought was actually a much better match for her in Dimitri. Sure, I was caught in that romance at the beginning, but that just wasn’t a sensible choice. I didn’t feel that he was the one for her. I wanted to believe that she was getting past it and that she’d find a new future with Adrian, but she didn’t.

After all her talk of best friendship, I thought she ended up using Lissa the most. By making her friend queen – she didn’t make it happen entirely but she certainly got into the idea and made it so it COULD happen – she took away Lissa’s young adulthood and freedom, something she’d obviously longer for in previous books. Maybe Lissa was the best choice, but primarily the goal was to delay the Moroi election, and to buy Rose time. It was selfish, although in some respects she made up for it in the end.

This was a good series, even if it didn’t end precisely how I wanted with Last Sacrifice. Recommended for fans of YA fantasy and vampires.

I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.