The first two books were challenging but mostly kept me fascinated.  So I really wanted this third book to wrap up the story.  It was just really difficult to read.

The story is written for black peoples.  I had difficulty with the names which are, I believe, from African dialects. Unfamiliar names tend to slow down the pace.  But even worse were words that are either also African in origin or made-up; I have no way to know but they also slowed the pace down and contributed to much confusion for this reader.  There was also quite a bit of black/African history that drove parts of the story. The problem with those bits was the assumption that the reader would have a passing familiarity with them.

This story was incredibly complex and I applaud the author's plotting but there were so many characters (with the difficult names) that I had trouble keeping track of them all.

Epyc Ro and her Reapers are finally coming home.  I think their absence is measured in months but I'm not sure.  They are bringing the unimaginable: proof of alien life and friends.  And proof that the imagined alien threat provided by O.E. (original Earth) is fabricated by their agents and designed to bring Muungano under their control in the guise of providing a united front against the so-called alien invasion.

Stacia's Cypher is millions of years in the past (couple problems with this passage: I had forgotten that part and the author didn't remind me so I was a bit confused reading this, plus the chapters advance in tens of thousands of years, which didn't make sense at first).  The ship crashes and in the process all but destroys a planet with the impact.  Since, for all intents and purposes, the crew of Cypher are the only living sentient beings on the planet and no way to go home, they will need to build a new home while, hopefully, keeping the culture of Muungano.  This part of the story gave the author an opportunity to explore the evolution of Muungano over thousands of years but it was too few pages to really grasp the whole history.  It did have a delightful tidbit at the end.

The Camara is still fending off feints from O.E. designed to destabilize Muungano. Another assassination of a revered leader almost does it. The Muungano elders have a younger generation to both rear and fend off, to keep to their path. 

Some plot points were cleared up although they seemed a bit anticlimactic. As near as I could tell, the main point of the book was to show a variety of different characters in different places within the Muungano society and how they were reacting to change.  The author also really wanted to drive home the idea of the potential black people could have if they could truly separate their culture from white culture.  He created a society different enough from white folks (O.E. in the story) that aspects of it were no longer understandable to O.E. 

The author appeared to make the story into an ouroboros but I didn't feel the ending was explained sufficiently.  By that I mean, the opening event in the first book was created at the end of this third book.  I would love to explore that more but it would be a huge spoiler.  I just wanted a more indepth exploration of the ramifications and results. 

Overall, it is an impressive piece of work; just not written for my demographic. It is a hopeful story and I very much wish I had friends of color who could decode it for me.  I'd like to know how much we see the same.  ~~ Catherine Book

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