They met in college. Each of them had come to college thinking they wouldn't fit in, as they hadn't fit in growing up. But they found each other and formed a group that would have lifelong connections. Zelda was a Southern girl from a small rural fundamentalist town. She found Sal, a brash Brooklyn girl and they fell in love. Ramon and Ish were roommates and best friends. Sarah was the most traditional of the group and kept them grounded.

The five found a secret about the universe and hit the road to save the world. They found alternate universes and fought the rot that was threatening ours. But at the end, Sal took a step too far and was lost in an alternate world.

It's ten years later. Zelda has never left the road, crisscrossing the country, hoping to find a way to get Sal back and repairing the rot where she could. She finally realizes that she can't do this journey by herself and calls the others back together along with Sal's sixteen year old cousin June who insists she come along to find her cousin. But the trip is perilous with horrors in other alts and a new enemy, The Man In The Cowboy Hat. He tracks the group and its unclear what he wants but clear that he intends to get it. Will the group be successful this time?

This is a magnificent American road trip. The relationship between the characters is heart sustaining. Zelda is faithful to her first love and determined to do whatever it takes to be reunited with her, no matter the price she will have to pray. The others have moved on in life, with professions like doctor and engineer but know they left something undone in their past. They come together to save Sal but more importantly to save the world. I listened to this novel and the narrator was perfect, making the fantastic routine and the various fights exciting. This book is recommended for fantasy readers. It may be Max Gladstone's best work and that's saying a lot.

3.5 stars

Part “great American road-trip” (from hell), part quest, part “where are the Chosen Ones now”, LAST EXIT brings so much content (some sharp, some satirical, some sad, a whole lot in WTF territory) with this road-trip through the multiverse that it’s actually rather difficult to follow. The whole ending just totally escaped me and I’m honestly not sure what happened; it feels like i missed a step and ended in freefall because suddenly it was over.

I loved that every world they visited was worse than the one they left behind - like the only thing they can truly imagine is something worse than where they started. It’s a message about the near-constant decline and cynicism that plagues us. I loved that each of our “returning” characters were so clear and so complicated and how they look back upon their youth not with joyful nostalgia but with a kind of “what were you thinking?” It felt very much like they’d grown up in the interim.

Perhaps the foremost master of urban fantasy in the 21st century turns his head towards the road novel and beats us over the head with a sci-fi/fantasy/horror novel all rolled into one. It spins together the end of the world with found family, love, and some chilling, creepy beauty. A wonderful novel with a bit for everyone.

What a unique mix of fantasy, horror and science fiction! It certainly exceeded my expectations and has become a standard title on my recommends shelf. Its both a tale to be absorbed in and an masterful blend of different timelines and parallel universes . I am a fan of the writing style and truly enjoyed the dialogue. This is a big character driven novel, where the nature of what they feel, think, believe, action and the ramifications thereof are well crafted together and have created a highly entertaining read.

This is storytelling at its best!

Gladstone’s books always have a way of grabbing you by the throat and not letting go. Empress of Forever – which I also thoroughly loved – did it, and Last Exit is an improvement on the formula. Stretches of introspection that verge on poetry give it texture, with more room to breathe. Not to mention the achievement of juggling five point of view characters and having them all feel distinct and rich and layered.
Full review on YouTube.

Traveling through space and time in order to save earth? This is a genre bending book that includes sci fi, fantasy, and horror with some modern western themes thrown in. I love books that don’t fit in a category and this is one that won’t soon be forgotten.
Ten years ago, Zelda led a band of merry adventurers whose knacks let them travel to alternate realities and battle the black rot that threatened to unmake each world. Zelda was the warrior; Ish could locate people anywhere; Ramon always knew what path to take; Sarah could turn catastrophe aside. Keeping them all connected: Sal, Zelda’s lover and the group's heart. Until their final, failed mission, when Sal was lost. When they all fell apart. Ten years on, Ish, Ramon, and Sarah are happy and successful. Zelda is alone, always traveling, destroying rot throughout the US. When it boils through the crack in the Liberty Bell, the rot gives Zelda proof that Sal is alive, trapped somewhere in the alts. Zelda’s getting the band back together—plus Sal’s young cousin June, who has a knack none of them have ever seen before. As relationships rekindle, the friends begin to believe they can find Sal and heal all the worlds. It’s not going to be easy, but they’ve faced worse before.
I loved the relationships that this book contained and the feeling of entering a whole new and terrifying world. The characters are well fleshed out with beautiful prose and a meaningful storyline. I recommend this book to anyone who values a good story.

I started reading Last Exit twice but I just couldn’t finish it. The narrators voice made me either sleepy or zoning out.
The book’s discription sounded sooo exciting so I’m really disappointed.

This book was strange there were parts that really drew me in but long stretches of this book were so drawn out and boring I could not finish this book. I made it to the half way point and could just not get any further.This book is pretty difficult to describe the plot of it kind of a post apocalyptic horror sci-fi book that follows a group of young adults as they try to save the world from this mysterious rot by using magic based on tricking reality. Some of the ideas in this book were really engaging and interesting but I just really could not get into the characters. The characters to me are annoying and boring and truly did not care about. I will say I really enjoyed the writing style it was beautifully written but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I will say this book had major Stephen King vibes and at times felt a lot like the Dark Tower series. I feel like this might be the right book for some but just not for me. I listened to the audio book with this one and the narrator was good I think that this book may be a little easier to understand in physical form. I would like to thank the publishers and Netgalley for a chance to read this book for an honest review.

There was a serpent gnawing at the roots of the world. Zelda, June, Sarah, Ramon and Ish go on the road trying to do something to slow it down or keep it at bay or just stop it. If they can. Because they believe they must. Because they tried before – and they failed.

But, and it’s a very big but that fills the sky with thunder and lightning and cracks the ground all around them every place they go – is that “last exit” they’re searching for the last exit to get OFF the road that is heading TO hell, or is it the last exit to get ON that road. Differences may be crucial – and nearly impossible to judge when the critical moment arrives with the ring of boot heels on cracked and broken pavement.

Ten years ago, five college students (Sal, Zelda, Sarah, Ramon and Ish) who all felt like outsiders at their preppy, pretentious Ivy League school (cough Yale cough) discovered that they each had a ‘knack’ for exploring the multiverse. So, they decided to go on an adventure instead of heading out into the real world of adulting, jobs and families.

They wanted to make the world better – or find a world that was better – rather than settle for and in the world they had. So they went on ‘The Road’ and explored all the alternate worlds they could find within the reach of their “souped up” car.

They found adventure all right. And they were all young enough to shrug off the danger they encountered and the damage they took escaping it. But what they did not find was anyplace better. They didn’t even find anywhere that was all that good.

They helped where they could and escaped where they had to and generally had a good time together. But, and again it’s a very big but, all the worlds they found had given way to the same terrible applications of power and privilege and use and abuse that are dragging this world down. They found death cults and dictatorships and slavery and madness everywhere they went.

The multiverse was rotting from within, because there was a serpent gnawing at the roots of the world.

So together they embarked upon a desperate journey to the Crossroads at the heart of all the multiverses, the place where there might be a chance to not just shore up the forces of not-too-bad in one alternate world, but in all the alternate worlds all at the same time.

They failed. And they lost the woman who was their heart and their soul. Sal fell through the cracks of the world. She was lost to the rot that was destroying not just the alts but their own world as well.

That could have been the end of their story. And it almost was. Without Sal, they fell apart. Individually and collectively. Sarah went to medical school and raised a family. Ish raised a tech empire. Ramon tried to destroy himself, tried to forget, and ended up back where he started.

And Zelda stayed on the road, sleepwalking through ten years of loneliness, doing her best to plug the holes in this world where the rot was creeping in.

Because it was all their fault – it was all her fault. She lost Sal, the woman she loved – and then everything fell apart. She feels duty-bound, obligated and guilt-ridden, to fix it.

It takes ten years, and a kick in the pants from Sal’s cousin June, for Zelda to finally acknowledge that the only way she can fix what she broke, what they broke, is going to require more than a little help from their friends.

If they’re willing to take one final ride on the road.

American Gods by Neil GaimanEscape Rating A-: In the end, Last Exit is awesome. But it takes one hell of a long and painful journey to reach that end. Because it starts with all of them not just apart, but in their own separate ways, falling apart. And it ends with all of their demons coming home to roost – and nearly destroying them – as they relive the past and do their damndest to push through to either some kind of future – or some kind of sacrifice to balance out the one they already made when they lost Sal.

The reader – along with Zelda and Sal’s cousin June – starts out the story believing that it’s all about the journey. Or that it’s a quest to reach a specific destination that may or may not be Mount Doom. It’s only at the very, very bitter end that they – and the reader – figure out that it was about the perspective all along.

A lot of readers are going to see a resemblance to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, but I haven’t read that so it wasn’t there for me. What I saw was a sharp comparison to American Gods by Neil Gaiman – both because it’s very much an “American Road Story”, even if most of the Americas are alts, but especially because of that sudden, sharp, shock at the end, where the reader has to re-think everything that came before.

I listened to Last Exit all the way through, and the narrator did a terrific job of differentiating the voices. There was a lyricism to the characters’ internal dialogs that she conveyed particularly well – it was easy to get caught up in each one’s internal thoughts and understand where they were coming from, even if the sheer overwhelming amount of angst most of them were going through was occasionally overwhelming – both for the characters and for the listener.

Part of what makes this a densely packed and difficult story and journey is that the main character and perspective is Zelda – who is just a hot mess of angst and guilt and regret. We understand why she blames herself for everything – whether anything is her fault or not – but there seems to be no comfort for her anywhere and you do spend a lot of the book wondering if she’s going to sacrifice herself because she just can’t bear it a minute longer.

The story feels a bit disjointed at points because the narrative is disjointed both because Zelda keeps telling and experiencing snippets of what happened before interwoven with what’s happening now and because the alts themselves are disjointed. It’s clear there’s some kind of organizing geography, but I just didn’t quite see it. To me, the alts all sounded like various aspects of the fractured future Earth in Horizon: Zero Dawn and I stopped worrying about what went where.

There were a lot of points where I seriously wondered where this was all going. Where it ended up wasn’t what I was initially expecting – at all. But it was one hell of a journey and I’m really glad I went, even if I needed a cocoa and a lie-down to recover from the sheer, chaotic wildness of the ride.

This book is a modern fantasy road novel about getting older, the lasting impact of trauma, and learning to overcome the roadblocks we all set in our way.

The comparisons to the Dark Tower are apt, as much of the time in this book is spent with the characters in worlds which are often devoid of other people. The cast is a group who are all carrying their own traumas in addition to the core events which links them.

Most of the plot beats are straightforward, though they do grow out from the characters themselves. Notably, the climax where Ish betrays everyone and sides with the Cowboy because he’s unable to let go of his pain wasn’t a surprise, but it married well with the themes of the book.

The prose can be dense at times (reading it in audiobook format served me well here) and often poetic. I enjoyed it, but I could see how not all readers would.

<i>Thanks to the publisher -RB Media for providing ARC in exchange for an honest review via NetGalley.</i>


<b>3/5 stars</b>

It was okay. I really wanted to enjoy it. Alas, it wasn't what I was hoping it to be. However, there were many parts that I was enjoying reading it.

<b>Release Date: 08 Mar 2022.</b>

<b>Review Posted: 07 May 2022.</b>

3.5 Stars. NetGalley ARC.

College friends Zelda, Sal, Ramon, Ish and Sarah explore alternate universes and try to keep the "rot" that destroyed those worlds from finding its way into our world. On one trip Sal is left behind and the group breaks up. Ramon, Ish and Sarah seemingly move on and lead normal lives. Zelda, the group's leader and Sal's partner, continues on the road, going through alts and removing rot. 10 years later, Zelda decides it's time to deal with the Sal situation once and for all. She gets the group back together, along with Sal's teenage cousin June and they travel through the alts one last time.

I overall enjoyed this audiobook. The narrator does an excellent job. This is an emotionally charged book and you can really hear it in her narration. The writing is very lyrical, I like Gladstone's style. What he really captured is the strange intimacies of college friendships. In college you're in a bubble with your friends for 4 years. After graduation people naturally drift apart. In most cases it's due to distance, time and different lifestyles. In this case it's because the glue holding them together is trapped in an alternate dimension. When Zelda, Ramon, Sarah and Ish are reunited they finally start to deal with their unresolved issues from their time on the road. Young June yearns to be thought of as an adult by her fellow travelers, and discovers a terrifying power in the alts.

My only issue w

Despite the bonkers premise that seemed right up my alley, I just couldn't deal with the way this author wrote any longer.

I really enjoyed Gladstone's collaboration with Amal El-Mohtar in This Is How You Lose the Time War, but the writing aspects that I loved in that book felt dragging and cumbersome in this book. While Time War jumped around in the timeline and gave me a sense of intimacy, those same things aggravated me in Last Exit. I just wanted to yell at the author to get to the point. Alas, I threw in the towel around the 27% mark. Dealing with another 15ish hours of ruminations, navel gazing, and tangents was not how I wanted to spend my time.

While I enjoy Natalie Naudus as a narrator, the faults I found in her narration of She Who Became the Sun popped up again here. Naudus has an intimacy to her voice that lets you settle in immediately and is immensely pleasing to the ear. Her portrayal of Zelda was excellent, but, again, Naudus struggles with performing multiple voices. Though not as hard to distinguish between characters as in She Who Became the Sun, it is noticeable enough that sometimes as a listener you have to pay close attention.

This book may work for some, but it was too long for me to stick with the parts that I really began to dislike.

DNF at about 20%. I really really tried but I just could not continue with this book. Maybe someone who really loves high fantasy/ hard scifi could enjoy this but I really could not buy into the world and did not care one bit about the plot or the characters and somehow found this story both boring and weird in a way that was offputting instead or interesting. I probably would have given up even earlier if this wasn't an arc or audiobook.
Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for providing me with arc of the audiobook in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed the premise of this book, but the writing became tedious. The main character is a like-able and strong female, but the writing seems to belabor the same point over and over as if the reader can’t keep up.

Well, my first beast from Max Gladstone done. I don't know what didn't work for me here - the length, the lyrical story, or the weird plot line, but I was bored out of my mind with this one. I think this would work better with physical copy and taking your time absorbing the characters and their arcs. Overall a cool concept, saving the world trying to catch the monster that travels through parallel worlds, but it is all created in your head, Just needs time to be processed (at least for me).

Thank you to the publisher for a chance to listen to the audio version,

DNF at 88%
3 star. Not a bad book but I didn't mesh with it.

Thanks to NetGalley for an audio-arc of this in exchange for a fair and honest review

This review is spoiler free, but does discuss the basic set up and some world building.

I knew Max Gladstone from his work cowriting one of my favorite books of last year, This is How You Lose the Time War (Time-War for short). That book was weird, creative, and oh so beautifully written. Then I read the description on NetGalley, "American Gods meets The Dark Tower in a dark, contemporary fantasy of the open road, alternate realities, and self-discovery" and it was hard to resist. I saw this audiobook arc was up, and I requested it to justify reading it before the rest of the books on my TBR. I got the book, and unlike most arcs, it prompted me to pick it up almost immediately.

It's easy to understand the appeal. Author of the Time-War. Multiverse. Scifi meets fantasy (more on that in a bit). This book seemed like the perfect fit for me, and at first, it was.

The book follows a group of friends who've grown apart, focusing on one woman in particular. She has a secret, something that happened with an ex of hers in college who ran away (or disappeared?) out of nowhere. Fast forward to now and something pushes her to go and search for her (i.e. the ex), accompanied by her ex's younger cousin (now the age they were then).

We then are slowly introduced to the world--the true world. Our world is an illusion, a thin veneer overlying a darker, almost supernatural, world underneath. Except, to call it supernatural isn't quite right. The magic of this world is rooted in quantum mechanics, uncertainty, etc. etc. I fucking love that. Or at least I thought I would. This is where the cracks begin to show.

There is something about the world building that doesn't quite work for me. The world, and the threat it presents us with, is one I don't quite believe. I think part of that is the fine line between world building and over explaining. I don't think the problem is overt. It felt subtle. Even as I described it to you, part of me wanted to drop everything and start the book all over again to give it another try. Despite my small issue (and they are small) with the world building, it still pulls me in.

Where then is the problem? It certainly isn't the writing. Gladstone write beautifully and descriptively. The flowery writing of Time-War turned off many readers, but I love it. Couple in a solid narration (not the best, but suitable), and it made for a great experience. The problem was with the characters.

We are introduced to only a couple characters at first, but overtime we are introduced to the larger friend group. In doing so, we explore their lives a bit more. This is where the story lost me. I went for caring to just wanting it to be over. No amount of fascinating world building and beautiful writing will save a story with a plot that doesn't pull me in (remember I don't quite believe the threat) and characters I have little to no interest in. Cue zoning out.

Zoning out is the quintessential sign that a book isn't working for me. I don't think it would have been DNF worthy, if the story had been a bit more compact. It comes it at 400 pages and over 21 hours of audio. Even at my near-2x speeds that's 11 hours. I was forced with 2 or 3 hours of disinterest and DNFing it. The sad thing is, if ever there was a book for me to love, it was this. The fact that my review is this long speaks to how it spoke to me on some level. Even writing about it, I feel a very strong urge to say, "fuck it," and give it a second try. I might actually do that; I don't even know anymore.

I'll see if the urge remains, and if it does, I'll give it another go. Until then, this just didn't work for me.
3/5 stars

ARC audiobook provided in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed how this story was written and the plot was very captivating! I always love getting lost in a different world and this book definitely took me there. The characters were all extremely well developed. I enjoyed the narrator but really wish there had been different voices for the main characters, as sometimes it was difficult to remember who was speaking. I felt the story could’ve been shortened a bit as the audiobook is over 22 hours long, but other than that, I really enjoyed the story and would definitely recommend for anyone looking for an epic fantasy!

As a piece of literary speculative fiction, this book is so hard to classify. It has elements of an interesting magic system, yet it does not feel fantastical. It is also technically science fiction with its post apocalyptic story, yet those elements almost fade into the background. 

Really this is a story of characters. The plot is sparse and slow. These kinds of stories don't always work well for me, but this one did.

The writing and storytelling in this book really floored me. Despite the thin plot, I found myself captivated by much of the narrative. Admittedly, my interest waned during some sections and it could have been been bit shorter, but overall I was really enamored by this one.

Overall I highly recommend this one to anyone who can appreciate a piece of character driven SFF with fantastic character work.

Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

Max Gladstone is a favourite author of mine. His Craft Sequence is on my list of all-time favourite "escapist books that don't insult me" list (and is out of print, which I hope is changed soon, as I got them out of the library and can't find the last two for sale anywhere). Other books are a bit weightier and less escapist but explore so thoughtfully questions of identity, politics, power and change that his new releases are a must-read for me. I think the worst reaction I've ever had to one of his books was "I guess that was ok," but generally they're a solid 4 or 5 stars, and I was very excited to listen to this audiobook.

(I've tried and given up on NetGalley e-books as the print is too small on my phone and aren't worth struggling through. Audiobooks work though, and the narration on this one was well done and a pleasure to listen to.)

Much of this is going to be behind a spoiler alert because my favourite parts of the book are questions not resolved until much closer to the finish, but: on the surface, this is a familiar quest fantasy novel, of four Chosen Ones in a merry band off to save the world from destruction and Certain Evil (climate change, inequality, war, the collapse of democracy -- they are all named and included here). They're smart, ivy league grads who did not come from money, diverse racially, geographically and in terms of sexuality, and not stereotyped or tokens.

This on its own would be a satisfying addition to the "escapist fiction that doesn't insult me" list, but Gladstone is doing much more than that here.

In climate work, we frequently talk about Hope vs. Fear, the necessity of imagining better futures in order to inspire people to work for change, and he directly tackles this (not just pertinent to climate work, I know). The main characters are smart and well-intentioned and developed techniques to hope between alternative worlds and timelines, and in every one are limited by the futures they can foresee, by their own pessimism. (I'm not spoiling anything here--this comes up very early in the book.) They never find a world better than their own; every one is worse, and usually much worse, often post-apocalyptic.

It has been ten years, as the novel opens, since this group of four have been world-hopping, looking for a future and a solution. In that time, one has stayed on the path, fighting evil; the other three have gone to varying forms of a normal life. Events at the beginning of the novel bring them together to try again, as a former fifth member of their group, lost to 'evil,' is coming back, this time to end the world for sure ... or not.

In this novel I think Gladstone nails the problem with precision and grace. His questions and the exploration of them are exactly right. I'm less convinced of his conclusions, in part because he seems less sure and less detailed of them himself. But in having asked the questions so well he's earned my admiration. This is a novel worth reading and thinking about.

(visit the goodreads link for the spoilers)