Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore

This book was the last in the Graceling series, and it was a really interesting one. Bitterblue is a princess from Graceling, who is now the queen ruling the kingdom of Monsea and trying to help the kingdom recover from the thirty-five years of her father's deceptions and illusions that he used while he was king. She begins to try to sneak out of the castle and to get to know what's really going on in her city, and makes some friends who aren't in the castle--and begins to uncover some major problems that are going on in her city that she wasn't aware of. This book reads a little like a mystery, with Bitterblue trying to find out who's lying to her and who's doing what, as she tries to make better decisions about what her country needs.

I think my favorite thing about this book was how all three of the novels came together, with the characters from Graceling and Fire all coming together at the end. I loved how Cashore was able to link all of them and to show us how Fire and her friends ended up 50 years after their book ended. I also liked Bitterblue's character--she was queenly and determined but not all-knowing or all-powerful like Katsa and Fire, and she made mistakes.

I think this trilogy was great and created in a really interesting world. There were a few things I didn't love about it, but none of those had anything to do with the quality of the writing or of the characters and world-building.

The one funny thing about this audiobook was that this one was done by a different production company than the first, so for some reason Katsa and Po and Raffin and Bann and all of these characters that had been in the first book all had very strong Scottish accents for some reason. I felt like it almost made them comical, which I don't think they are at all... it was just funny how listening to the book made such a difference to my experience of the characters.