I loved the first book in this series, the second one was pretty good too but the third? It felt off. The change from book 1 to two was like linear growth, the natural progression of oh it's a people problem to oh it's a little more than that was excellent. But in book three, man, the change was exponential, making it hard to push through this book. The overwhelming influx of new things right away just left me confused and sad, of the things I was expecting from this book I can't quite say it was what I got. The time gap is reasonable but so many new characters, technologies, and a "change" in villains had me wondering what is going on. Bring about the new locations too it was all very stunning world-building but I felt like I was 3-4 steps behind the book the entire way. Just trying to catch up on what I was actually reading. I reread the series a lot and I know I will reread this series again this year most likely. When that happens I will read this book again with a fresh pair of eyes and a brain less confused. I really wanted this to be an amazing third book but it just missed the mark for me.

Thank you to the author, Del Rey/Penguin Random House and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this free digital ARC. My review is voluntary and spoiler-free.

I loved the 1st two books in Robert Jackson Bennett's Founders trilogy and had been looking forward to the conclusion. I'm happy to say that it did not disappoint. The evolutions in the use of scriving made sense and I enjoyed the contrast between how the protaganists wove it into their lives in contrast with how the antagonists used it. Most of the POV focuses on Berenice, Sancia and Clef with smaller focus on other characters including Tevane and Crasedes.

I was sad about the changes to the team and the more serious tone compared to the previous two, but it was fitting for the subject matter. Locklands focuses on the continued war between Tevane and humanity. It also illuminated Clef and Crasedes' beginnings. It was darker than the previous books, unsurprisingly, and had lots of action and tension especially in the last 20%.

There were some heartbreaking events. Some of them affected me less because they happened offpage, between books or involved characters that were new to the trilogy and to whom I had not much connection. Some of them moved me to tears.

I wish there had been a novel or novella to bridge the gap between books 2 and 3, but overall I enjoyed reading it and was bittersweetly happy with the conclusion.

“We are a dream. A half thing. An unfinished work. There must be other versions. Better ones. And then none of this will have ever been real.”

What a thrilling conclusion to the Founders Trilogy. This has been one of my favorites to read and certainly one that is unforgettable to me. This was darker than the others in the series but still so enjoyable to be back with the gang. I loved getting to see more about Clef’s life too. I highly recommend this series!

Book 3 returns us to the world with Sancia, Clef, and Berenice. They have been at war for years with an enemy whose knowledge and power grows at every turn. Will our heroes survive?

If you have the time I would recommend reading the first two installments again- this is not what I did, and there were so many details that I had forgotten or missed. There is a lot of action and detail but it moves along at a good clip. Some of the detail I was able to skim by in some smaller moments.

Overall I loved the finale of this series. The ending is certainly bittersweet! I truly felt Berenice and Sancia’s love; I think this is one of the great strengths of this author. The emotion is embedded in the text and it just transports you to those moments. I also really liked the note at the end by the author and their experience during the pandemic and writing this book.

Loved the overall ending to this book and so happy to have been able to read it. Thank you NetGalley!

That epilogue though!!!!!

The conclusion of this book broke my heart! And, with that being said, it was still a great book.
The evil Trevanne is trying to kill the world while resetting things and who knows what all, it's a bit confusing for me at times. I can just say the big baddie in the book is destroying things and made me sad.
The gang is doing everything in their power to stop the evilness and yes, this involves some deaths.
We also get a great look into Clef's life. He's my favorite and it's really sad as backstories are sometimes.
Overall, I loved the book. I didn't love it as much as the first two but it's still a great book. I'm happy-ish with this conclusion. Sorry......sad people, just sad!

*Thank you to Netgalley for a digital copy of this book.

The Founders trilogy finally concludes here. I had a little trouble getting up to speed, and wondered if there had been an unusual gap between the second and third books, but not really. It's about the same length as well, so that does not explain my occasional impatience with the pace of the story telling.

The story takes place eight years after the events of Shorefall. Sancia, Berenice and Clef escaped from the ruins of the city of Tevanne--which has now become a conscious entity with God-like powers--and founded the floating city of Giva. It opens with the prelude to a battle, so for the most part the reader is just thrown into the new status quo. It is a scary situation, which finds the team winning by the skin of their teeth, and not without serious losses. Tevanne's ability to edit reality seems almost unstoppable, and he commands an army of human hosts who are completely in thrall to his will.

In the aftermath the team hatches a bold scheme: they decide to rescue the hierophant Crasedes from his Tevanne prison and kill him, so Tevanne will be unable to learn his secrets. This involves an espionage operation that almost works...but leaves them on the run from Tevanne, with Crasedes as an unexpected ally. Their new goal is to beat Tevanne to a doorway which leads behind our reality, to prevent him from attempting a reset of all of reality. This is about as high as stakes get, so there is plenty of drama. In addition to huge battles there is even a bit of the heist action that was so central to the earlier books.

In the midst of the darkness and death this installment also explores the early history of Clef (back when he was human) and his family. In the end the whole story can be seen as a kind of family drama, on an epic scale. A final brief Epilogue shows the transformation of human society in the new world of intimate connection, and concludes with a surprising reunion.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance reader's copy.

This book was bonkers. Just absolutely insane. Thankfully, it was insane in a (mostly) good way, maybe even a great way. There are moments of pure adrenaline and moments of pure sadness. I shouldn't be surprised by the latter after reading The Divine Cities, but Bennett really knows how to wrench the soul.

In the end, this is a thoroughly fitting and successful conclusion to the Founders Trilogy; it deserves all the attention it gets and more!

Locklands is the thrilling conclusion to the Founders Trilogy. Many years after the end of the second book, Sancia and her friends are still trying to survive in a world devastated by endless war.
Overall the book focuses a lot on the ongoing conflict with Tevanne, who attempts to reshape the world by enslaving humanity and attempting to change the building blocks of the world. Since it is the last book in the trilogy, we also discover background information on Clef, Tevanne, and Crasedes.
Aside from the characters, the scriving element of the series has been pushed to its absolute limit. I genuinely enjoyed its simplicity in the first two books, but I struggled with it in Locklands. It has evolved to such an extent that it felt more like magic than a logical set of instructions to reshape the world.
Nonetheless, Locklands was an enjoyable conclusion with a couple of interesting aspects.

I definitely felt that this third installment was a step up from book two. I found the pacing of book two to be off and it made it difficult to get lost in the story. Locklands had a much better flow to it. My favorite aspect of these books is hands down the magic system - it’s like nothing I’ve read about before and it’s awesomeness was on full display in this book. While I still struggled a bit to connect with the characters, I think that the overall story and interesting conclusion were enough to keep me invested until the very end.

I absolutely adored the first two books of this series. I fell head over heels for the characters and the magic system in these books. Really, really original and very well done. I’ve been looking forward to this final installment!

At the beginning of the book I felt lost. We jump 8 years into the future and there are several new characters and it seems like the entire scape of the planet has been changed. Sancia and the crew have been fighting against Tevanne for the 8 years. They have slowly been rescuing people from Tevanne’s control and have been incorporating them into a new society. But they are still no where close to defeating him. Then Clef has a vision of Cresedes being held in a prison by Tevanne which makes them realize they have to change their tactics and soon.

The first half of this book felt really really long. I wasn’t sure what was going on, there were characters I had little emotional connection with, there was a lot of talking/deciding what to do. But once the action really got going it was a much quicker read. I really enjoyed the flashbacks where Clef was remembering and learning the backstory of how the world got the be where it is at this point in the story. And the ending was, of course, epic.

I feel like there was some charm missing from this third installment vs. the first two. That said, I appreciate the wisdom in this third installment. Sancia and Bernice, and Clef and Cresedes have some wonderful moments of realization that we can all learn from.

First half -3 stars, second half - 5 stars.

Overall 4 stars.

This was so not where I thought the trilogy was going when I first read Foundryside, but holy shit I'm surprised in the best way. The contrast between the Tevanne hivemind and the transhumanist Givan society is so well done.. There's war. There's heists. There's tragic sacrifices and sad backstories, and an ending that made me sob in the best way. Truly a masterful trilogy.

This was a solid 4.5 star read for me until the end, which gave me all the feelings.

Locklands really needs to be read after the previous two in the trilogy. It is darker than the other two - although some of the scenes from the previous books have remained with me - eeek. A lot of time is spent on the magic system, and progress that has been made since the close of the second book. Horribly, the magic that can be used for so many wonderful things can also be used to control peoples' minds and to edit out reality. I really do love this magic that the author uses, which relies on innovation and study and isn't just a "gift".

I received an ARC from Netgalley and it is a book (and series) I'll certainly be recommending to the fantasy lovers I know.

This is the final book in the Founder's Trilogy and it has been a very exiciting fantasy. The world-building is first-rate and immersive. This book starts eight years following the ending of the second book. All the same characters are back and this time Sancia, Berenice, and Clef, are fighting to save their world. The evil characters are extremely powerful and knowledgeable. They are as determined to end the world as those on the "good" side are to save it.

The world is full of scrivings (programs written on objects and embedded in people) that control actions and can be 'twinned' to allow them to work together. Interesting concept. The scrivings make things work they way you want them to much as a computer program would do - only much more advanced.

A great plot and very well-developed characters kept my attention throughout the series. I think I liked the character Clef more than any of them - he's just amazing. Lots of action and all-out warfare in this one. It is a very tense and desperate situation.

Thanks to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine through Netgalley for an advance copy. This book will be published on June 28, 2022.

This was an okay end to the series but the whole thing just got way too big for me personally so I found myself skimming through a lot here. I really loved the first one where it was just a problem on a city-wide scale whereas here we have an eight year time skip and the main characters have basically founded their own nation and are waging a huge war for the fate of the whole world. I guess it makes sense that every successive book would 'need' to have bigger stakes to keep the audience interested but it's just not my particular cup of tea. I did like that we got more background about Clef and ...the villain from the last book whose name I can never spell lol and there was some stuff I liked in here in general but overall I just found it to be a big of a slog unfortunately.

I don't know what to say really. This is the first time I've completed a series and genuinely felt disappointed. The first took books were awesome and I recommended them to other people. This book felt I was missing an entire book while reading it. Even the characters themselves felt like totally different people. I wish there was another book in between this and the second, but unfortunately as it stands right now I wouldn't recommend this.

I've loved this series so much from the very beginning, so I'm a bit biased when it comes to reviewing its ending. As others have pointed out, Locklands thrusts us 8 years into the future and picks up with Sancia, Berenice, Clef, and others and introduces some great new characters as well. There's a war going on and the stakes are higher than ever. I loved the pacing of this, I loved the character development, particularly for Clef, and I absolutely loved loved loved the epilogue. Tore me open and ripped my heart right out in the best possible way.

Robert Jackson Bennett handled so many things about this series with so much love and respect, particularly the relationship between Sancia and Berenice, and that alone makes me a huge fan. It's not often you see relationships like this in books and while it wasn't the central focus of the storyline (part of what made it so affecting), it was incredibly moving and beautiful. I also loved the world-building he did from the very beginning of the series, and while at the end, the logic of the systems he created was somewhat questionable at times, I didn't mind at all and I thought everything that happened was well-earned.

I wouldn't hesitate to read anything he writes again (and City of Stairs is high on my TBR list next!). Thanks to NetGalley as always for the ARC. This one will stay with me for a long time as one of my favorite fantasy series I've ever read.

**I received an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

Robert Jackson Bennett wraps up the Founders Trilogy with the final novel, Locklands. Of course, for the concluding novel, it is difficult to discuss without spoilers. I will do my best to avoid them, but proceed with caution anyhow.

Locklands picks up roughly eight years after Shorefall, which I felt was an interesting choice. Shorefall also had a pretty decent time gap from the events of Foundryside. I felt that it was a clever choice of the author to allow for changes to seep into the world and to establish a new point where a great event might occur. After all, it is not so often that the falling of an empire occurs in back-to-back battles, but more often over a span of years. Jackson Bennett did well both in Shorefall and in Locklands to keep readers up to speed on all of the developments that occurred off page.

As in the rest of the trilogy, the world and the magic system remain strong. However, there was a notable shift from books one and two which seemed to establish the rules of the magic and then established the rules of the hierophants. On entering book three, readers know what can be done, and it seemed more about getting the characters into place in order to achieve a common goal in the plot. If book one was Sancia's book, and book two was Clef's, then book three arguably belongs to Berenice. Of course, the novels are much more complicated than simply that, but I still find that to be a decent manner of classification at its root.

Both Foundryside and Shorefall were five star reads for me, but I think that with the absence of learning the rules and the absence of the group dynamics I loved from the first two books, it was impossible for Locklands to achieve the same level of success for me. The cleverness of Robert Jackson Bennett certainly remains and I still found Locklands to be very accessible and readable for the amount of complexity it holds. However, I lacked some of the emotional connection I had in the first two books.

That being said, I can't think of any other way I might have wanted Locklands to end. The ending seemed, in some ways, inevitable and to have done anything differently about the ending might have been unsatisfying.

I was happy to read Locklands early, and will be more than happy to recommend this trilogy to others in the future.

That ending! This was a solid three star read up until the last 10% when it shifted into high gear. The action packed fight scenes and emotional revelations were spectacular. It could have been better edited because it seemed to lag a bit in the middle, too much filler, hence the 4 not 5 stars. Great ending to a great trilogy.

A great ending to a undervalued trilogy. It is a series I would recommend for beginners trying to get into fantasy. The scriving, magic system, is well thought out and explained but easy to grasp for those who arent interested in the minute detail of it. The ability to watch the magic system grow from the first two books was awesome to see. The scriving system of re-writing the rules to reality is a creative magic systems that is basic on the surface, but is incredibly deep; which is fully on display as the series evolves.

This book caps of the trilogy with a grand epic fantasy war. However, I feel like it got too grand for its own good, and lost some readability and relatability along the way.

Here's a link to my video review: https://youtu.be/bqJ33eMl384?t=8

This book starts 8 years after book 2, Shorefall. Sancia, Berenice, and the team are in the middle of a war they have been fighting for years, one that they are dangerously close to losing.

This 8 year time skip is used extraordinarily well. It breathes new life into the story, and provides a mystery of what happened in those skipped years. The world has changed in the meantime, and it's left to us to adjust to it.

In this book, the antagonist is a hivemind force. The protagonists are building their own kind of hivemind society, through the twinning magic. This provides an interesting thematic contrast in the story, as we see both the good and horrific features of a hivemind setup. I only wish that this had been used more, as it seemed to have so much potential. The characters seem tangentially aware of the fact that they are a reflection of the antagonist, but I wish that this had in some way played a larger part in the ending, where it seems all of the horrors of a hivemind situation are forgotten.

One of the fun parts of a magic system is the feeling of figuring out how it works. However, the magic in this book is so complicated that there are diagrams explaining the connections. After I read the passage three times, I still didn't understand what the diagrams were even trying to convey. At this point, the magic is so complicated that it has lost its fun.

The covers of these book are absolutely gorgeous. I can't stop talking about how perfect they are.

Thanks to Random House Publishing Group (Ballantine) and Netgalley for a copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.