Resistance is the fourth book in the Night School series and therefore this review may contain spoilers for the previous books.
Allie and Rachel have been shipped across Europe, moving from lush residency to lush residency. Finally, Allie feels somewhere safe when she reaches Sylvain’s family home, but the calm cannot last. Somehow Nathaniel’s people find her and she is forced to return to Cimmeria. Nowhere is safe, she might as well be home.
The long game is being played out, which kind of means not a lot of anything is happening much at Cimmeria apart from waiting for Nathaniel to do something again. I have loved the other Night School books but struggled to get into Resistance, as it takes a good long while for anything happen (bar the opening scene).
With the pupils getting so involved in protecting Lucinda’s interests, the ambiguous motivations of the Orion group (not to be confused with the publishers) had less justification. Yes, money, power and all that but I wanted some more concrete information. The heredity aspect of it gave me pause for thought, maybe Nathaniel is onto something. Night School is blindly protecting something they don’t even understand, or at least the reader doesn’t.
This also meant the focus was on Allie’s relationships. She’s conflicted, again. It felt like she had decided on Sylvain at the end of Fracture and that she loved Carter as a friend. So why is she all confused again at the start of a new book? I liked the way the previous books portrayed her indecision but this just draws it out too far. Series should be allowed to develop and move away from the same character arc every book. It’s OK for a protagonist to be content in her relationship.
I enjoyed the second half much more and I will certainly be reading the next book (due next year) which I think is the concluding part. There’s some interesting character developments in the final chapters and a whopping cliff-hanger.
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Book Source: Purchased
