Katherine Applegate

When Senna disappears along with their only link to the real world, April, David, Christopher, and Jalil help Merlin in undoing the harm she caused in Everworld, but must confront Hel, who would happily see them suffer for eternity.

Entertain the End

Brandon Waters

** spoiler alert **
           I've been reading the Everworld series since I was 10 years old when it all began. I'm 23 now and I finally finished the last book and judging by the number of stars I gave it you can probably tell "Entertain the End" was definitely not one of my favorites. It was a heartbreaking ending to something that ultimately helped shape my imagination and creativity growing up. It was so important to me as a kid that it made reading something to be excited about which is saying a lot for kids that age. It pains me to see it all end with just a two-star rating. 

The series itself had the potential to become even bigger than Animorphs and around the time of the fourth book things really took off. "Realm of the Reaper" came with an iron-on print that you could make your own Everworld t-shirt with and the series even had it's own soundtrack called "The Everworld Experience". Gradually the series evolved to have a cookie-cutter format with the main characters venturing from one mythos to the next meeting new friends and deities in each book. Slowly as the story progressed, the characters edged closer to the big finale against the main villain of the series, Ka Anor.

Something must have happened at Scholastic that brought the series to an end, though. Halfway through "Entertain the End" you can see a shift in Applegate's writing and instantly things felt very rushed. It was as if halfway through writing it she was told that there wouldn't be another Everworld book and she scrapped everything to wrap things up as quickly as possible. It was an ending that was right up there with the season finales of Dynasty and Lost. Entire plot-points within the series were ditched and at the end I was left scratching my head wondering what happened to certain major characters. It's not a stretch to end things with David, Chris, April, and Jalil living the rest of their days in Everworld - I can live with that, and I'd already assumed that was going to happen to at least one of them. But what about April's body phasing out in Everworld while the rest of them disappear in the real world? Did she just change her mind and decide she wanted to stay? If so, why didn't we hear about it? What about the FBI investigation into the disappearances in the real world? What happened to Brighid? The Sennites? Ka Anor? Are we just supposed to assume that with the help of Merlin and the rest of the Scooby-Gang of mythological beings that everything turns out alright? We never see Ka Anor defeated and we never see the main characters come back to reality. It just ends. K.A. Applegate has expressed that she hated the way the series ended and that it was a result of over-committing to something that became very demanding to write. I don't know all the details but I think that if she knew there was only going to be 12 books she would have had a lot more time and room to end things in a proper manner. The way things were going it wouldn't have been a stretch to think there could have been twenty books.

If I hadn't been so invested in it for so long I might have even given it one star, but there's still some good things in "Entertain the End". The sub-plot revolving around Chris and Etain continues and I finally started seeing Chris as a different person outside of the joker he'd been running around as in the first ten books. Also, seeing things continue past the death of Senna made the series significantly more interesting because it raised all new questions as to how the characters were going to get back to the real world without her. It's a shame we wont see things progress any further and after thirteen years as a fan it breaks my heart to see it end so abruptly.

Entertain the End

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