Read All The Books Aaaaaah! discussion

Here we go -- the last book to close out the series!

You might think that since this is the last book in the 5-book series, that Eddings would have been finished with the world-building by now. But here we are, on another tour through yet more previously-unseen lands, having encounters with no apparent relevance to the overall plot, just to allow Belgarath to explain the customs and culture of another group of people who we'll never see again.

That, and another carbon copy encounter with another king who is shocked to meet Belgarath, who he thought was a myth, reminding us yet again that things are serious.

There were a couple of interesting scenes here and there, such as Adara's horse-riding outing, but the bulk of the book was occupied with tedious travelling and absolutely unimportant political discussions that amount to NOTHING over the course of the book, unless I missed something during all of the blah blah war fighty scenes that just blurred together.

It's the epilogue now, and we're getting little vignettes of Garion checking in with all of the important side characters to see how they're doing after the big battle. I'm SO glad Eddings did the epilogue this way, even though it was awkward to frame all these little scenes as "things Garion is remembering as he's tossing and turning in bed", because I have little doubt his first plan was to detail Garion's travel to each and every one of those places, as he's been doing through this whole series!

The final battle was actually pretty emotionally hurtful, and it makes Garion seem a bit cruel, especially with the villain's dying words.

Eddings also threw in a rather abrupt romance between Polgara and Durnik. I knew he seemed to have a crush on her at some point, but I never saw any indication that she had any feelings for him, until it was needed for the plot apparently. And then we got that stupid trope where someone with authority arbitrarily decides that the one with the powers has to give up her powers if she wants to marry the normal human, because authority figure just can't believe they'd love each other as they are. Does anyone actually like that trope?

Anyway, in the epilogue basically everyone's getting married. This has more marriages than a Shakespeare comedy.

Almost done, but I wanted to mention these things while they were fresh in my mind.