Review: Sentinel (Covenant, #5)

Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout
Series: Covenant, #5
Released: November 2nd 2013
Publisher: Spencer Hill Press
Paperback, 360 pages
Buy: The Book Depository

It's a beautiful day for a war.

As the mortal world slowly slips into chaos of the godly kind, Alexandria Andros must overcome a stunning defeat that has left her shaken and in doubt of their ability to end this war once and for all.

And with all the obstacles between Alex and her happily-ever-after with the swoonworthy Aiden St. Delphi, they must now trust a deadly foe as they travel deep into the Underworld to release one of the most dangerous gods of all time.

In the stunning, action-packed climax to the bestselling Covenant series, Alex must face a terrible choice: the destruction of everything and everyone she holds dear… or the end of herself.

Five books filled with mythology and action; countless painful, almost heartbreaking moments; hundreds and hundreds of pages of deliciously hot romance… and now, we have finally reached the conclusion. The time has come to say goodbye to Alex, Aiden, Seth, Marcus and everyone else. Was this finale everything I’d hoped for? Well, no. But in the end, it made me feel peaceful and calm, happy with how we left the characters we’ve grown so attached to.

And make no mistake, my feelings for the characters are exactly what kept me reading through all the rough patches, plagiarism, occasional inconsistencies and the intolerable love triangle in those first few books. There were some horrible moments, yes, but if Armentrout knows anything, it’s how to keep her readers happy. Fan service is always at the very top of her list, and there was never any chance of her repeating the Veronica Roth fiasco.

In Sentinel, all of her qualities are even more enhanced. There are a lot of great moments fans will appreciate greatly, a lot of quality time spent with the characters, some truly magnificent action scenes (though not as many as one would expect), and of course, the romance is as swoon-worthy as ever, if not more.

Once you remove the emotional factor, however, and look at Sentinel objectively, all the flaws become painfully obvious. For a final installment, Sentinel was pretty uneventful around the middle. In fact, not much happened until that very last part, and while I admit that those last few pages made me reach for my tissues, the emotional impact wasn’t as strong as it could have been.

Armentrout’s writing is nothing to write home about, it never was, but in Sentinel, she made quite a few errors, more so than usual. I resent sloppiness – call it a personal flaw, if you will – and sloppiness towards language is the absolute worst in my eyes. When a Titan who’s been asleep and imprisoned for millennia wakes up and starts talking in modern colloquialisms, I consider it to be the result of sloppiness on the author’s side. How he managed to learn expressions like ‘all the rage’ while sleeping in the Underworld is beyond me, but he certainly started uttering them the second he opened his eyes. That is the kind of thing that can ruin a book in a heartbeat, an author not caring enough or not having enough skill to ensure appropriate language for his or her characters.

Looking back, there are so many things I could say about this series, and I did, in fact, express them all in my reviews. I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to recommend Covenant to someone since there are so many other series out there that for which I don’t have to make excuses, but I still had a lot of fun reading these five books. It is a fact that cannot, and should not, be ignored.