Music Box by Anya Allyn

The final book in the Dark Carousel series ends with a damp squibb rather than a fizzing rocket.  Ultimately, nothing is resolved for Cassie, Ethan, Molly, Sophronia, Aisha or Francis and we are left in a limbo where everything looks doomed to repeat itself all over again.  Whilst Music Box is not quite as disappointing as Marionette, it is a close call - this is quite possibly because so much time is expended on the Ice World and the Serpents when all I really want is the dark gothic tension of the Dollhouse and the Castle that are found in such glorious detail in the first two books.  Ultimately the series moves from a Gothic Horror to a more Science Fiction tale and the juxtaposition of the two just really doesn't work for me.

The other problem with Music Box is that so much is simply glossed over.  For example, Ethan helps a family escape from Canada into the continental United States, makes them aware of the Reapers and then joins a band of revolutionaries intent on throwing over the New World Order.  This results in us being told that they go to war on the Reapers but that's it, no details, no idea of what is happening to Ethan and the other fighters.  It almost feels as though the author has written themself into a corner and with no way out chooses to drop that strand and use the shadow paths to gloss over it all.

The sections at the Castle are, once again, the stand out pieces in this quadrilogy.  Sadly we spend much less time there this time around and it is much of a rehashing of information we already have from the previous books.  The only real revelation is the identity of the watcher in the tower but even that is tempered by the science fiction element of the Serpent Empress - although she has been a presence in the books from the outset she has a real impact in this one, even if it is one that feels evermore hackneyed.

I was really disappointed with how this series panned out.  The genre cross over just didn't work for me and I think it would have worked better as an either or book and that the Gothic Horror was really the way to go as the first two books were so strong.  Instead what we ended up getting was a bit of a mess really and neither one thing nor the other.  It also doesn't help that we are chested out of a definitive ending to the series, to be honest normally the whole thing being left open for further investigation would thrill me but in this case it just makes me sad.  I don't need a happy ending to a tale but I do kind of like an ending, a sense of finality for the characters.

My advice would be read Dollhouse and Paper Dolls and then just make the rest of the tale up in your head rather than reading Marionette and Music Box.