I think this book could've been shorter but the pacing issues I noticed in the last two weren't a problem. This is a solid conclusion to the series, though I do believe it would've worked better as a trilogy. I've heard so many people focus on the romance when talking about these books and it's actually really frustrating to see them get treated like The Hunger Games in that way. The Red Queen series builds on The Hunger Games in such a critical way that can best be described as if THG played out on an international scale. If all you noticed in these books was the "romance" (Mare is literally single for a solid 75% of the series), then you missed the point. These books strip back the layers and consequences of oppression and war in ways that many other books fail to and I will defend them until the end of time. Yes, the execution of these stories can have issues but that's a result of Red Queen being Victoria Aveyard's first book ever and the rest being her first series, and these issues do smoothe out by the third book.