Shattered (Slated #3)

Now that Kyla has been wiped from the system by Dr Lysander, Nico holds the belief that she has been killed in an explosion caused by him. Now she is completely off the grid and ready to sort everything out. Although this is the case, that doesn't mean that Kyla isn't still struggling with all the trauma that she has just remembered at the end of the second book. Katran is killed and remembers that the cause of her personality split was because Nico killed her dad right in front of her. This obviously isn't something that you can get over quickly and takes a lot of time and effort to lessen the pain, time and effort which she cannot afford to expend for that purpose.

The first major act of this book involves a shocking event that makes Kyla want to give up the ruse of her new identity. She is convinced not to, but for the rest of the book, this is something that is going to be hanging over her, something to convince her to act as swiftly as possible so that she can rectify this situation.

Even situations like her finding her mother and trying to remember everything about her are filled with tension. Never knowing what is going to happen, just knowing that eventually, something is going to go wrong. Why? How? When? Who knows, but that foreboding sense isn't something that disappears in this book at all.

Some parts of the story feel like they make no sense. Like they aren't going to lead anywhere, but as she has always done, Teri expertly joins these pieces together and is able to create coherent and conjoined plotlines.

I would have liked Katran to be mentioned more, as he wasn't someone that held much weight over this final chapter in the story for the most part, and yet he was a massive part of her life. Not everyone that is dead needs to be mentioned, but I thought that they had a relationship where such thoughts would've been commonplace.

As with the first and second books in this series, you can never tell who is going to do what. Who supports Kyla, or who is against her. Things may seem off around a character, and then it is revealed that they weren't against her, they seemed shady for a completely different reason. You're perfectly put into her shoes. Never knowing what is going to happen next, who is on her side, and who is going to betray her trust.

A lot of death is used to show how awful the Lorders actually are. Including the showing of kids being treated the same way an adult, only further shows just how horrible the Lorders are, and how they need to be stopped. Their actions have not been justifiable in any context throughout the whole book. Neither have the AGT's either. In fact, their actions are as bad as the Lorders. Using kids and brainwashing them into blindly following the leader and never questioning any orders given. Torturing these kids, training them to fight even if they don't want to, making sure that they are dependant on their leader, Nico, and then letting them die whenever he wants. The MIA are the best of the three. They still aren't perfect, but who is?

The trilogy ends off in a thrilling way that leaves some questions unanswered, some that I wanted to know more about, but also some that didn't need to be answered for the book to be finished. When the book was concluded I was worried that Ben was going to stay with Kyla, that they were going to be together again after what he did. But I am glad that the author didn't minimise his actions. What he did wasn't done by the Ben that Kyla knows, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't done by a variant of him. Being capable of doing everything he did, and the reveal that he had actually deserved to be slated, leaving the crime he committed up to the reader, was the right choice. It allows interpretation. Maybe he did actually do something horrible, or maybe he thought his actions so bad, when he got all those people massacred, that he didn't want to live with himself after the fact.

This final book is a fitting end to the series. Not everything has to be a massive reveal. Not everything has to be answered. Not everything should be, and wasn't, resolved.

Would recommend reading this book, and the series as a whole. Definitely a page-turner!

book: Shattered

author: Teri Terry