I enjoyed the plot and the different points of view of the characters. I know the series is getting more 'violent' for a children's series. . . I still loved it. I cannot wait to start the fin al hunt. I had to find an audio book due to the series being out of print. ( )

Loving the concept of the rainbow prison. Not so sure about the yin-yang villain. The creature pursuing Cara's posse underground was a nice dollop of horror (on top of all the other horror).

#drunkreview ( )

I don't think I've had an author leave a story so on edge as Coville does in the third of the Unicorn Chronicles. Quite literally, the action is just coming to a peak when we reach "the End," so I'm going to have to read the next and final novel soon. That being said, Coville does an admirable job building up the story to this point. His groups of protagonists are both questing for a solution to Beloved's coming invasion, we get the backstory behind her crazed obsession, and we get just enough of the villains' points of view that we feel that we can understnad them a bit. ( )

Bruce continues to demonstrate his imagination in this book. As the story of Cara continues, her understanding of Luster deepens, and she sees this land is not idyllic as she originally thought. She takes on tasks that would make grown men run, and shows her true character at every turn.
The story was able to take some twists and turns that took me by surprise (a hard thing to do) yet they fit in with the story, and the foreshadowing is obvious once the outcome is understood.

For parents:
There is some mild gore, and a brief nudity reference. Neither of these is done in an inappropriate way. Cara is rightly ashamed of being strip-searched, and there is no reference to others taking pleasure in it. Scenes of battle and death are appropriate for the amount of time and emotional investment the readers have put into those characters.
Most of all, in this book, we see that no one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. Everyone makes mistakes and has a history which drives their passions, even when not everyone remembers what that is. Good moral lessons in this book. ( )

3.5 stars. This review is also available on my blog, Read Till Dawn.

Bruce Coville got more and more long-winded as this series went on. I'm still trying to decide whether that's a good thing or not. I've never been a huge fan of the technique where the author switches POV every other chapter, telling two separate stories about two separate main characters. I usually find it really annoying, actually, because you're constantly braking to a halt just when one story is getting good, then switching to the other storyline that you've kind of forgotten about, and then switching back to the first one and so on and so forth.

In this case, though, this method worked pretty well. I mean, it worked better than it usually does. I still got frustrated every now and then when a story was cut off just as it was getting good, but in general it was pretty smooth. I guess it's just the best way to tell two different stories, when they're going on in completely different locations. My biggest beef with Dark Whispers, besides the switching-POVs, is actually one I already mentioned in my review of the second book - I don't like Cara's father. Like, at all. His motives just felt so fake to me, and I honestly didn't even believe his "transformation" at the end of Song of the Wanderer. By the end of the third book, I guess I do believe it (either that or he is most definitely biding his time), and he had some inner monologues that cleared up a little bit of the fog around his motives throughout the series, but still. I just don't like him.

Things weren't perfect over on Cara's side either (I mean seriously, her grandmother is terrible at communicating with people - and not in a "this makes sense" kind of way, but in a "I'm trying to keep the reader in suspense" way), but it was on the whole a much better read. I love Cara a lot, and while she still feels rather like a vanilla character, you really can't help but root for her. The discoveries she makes at the end of the book are pretty mind-blowing, and I love the new friend she makes along the way to her destination. Cara sometimes reminds me of Jenna from the Septimus Heap books, and the resemblance was strongest in Dark Whispers. It's funny, because I can't really identify why that is, or why she reminds even me of Jenna at all, but the underground scenes definitely had a Septimus-Heap-like feel to them. Which is definitely a plus in my book.

All in all, this is a pretty solid installment in the Unicorn Chronicles. If I was reviewing it as a standalone, I would be pretty tangled up between the parts I loved and the parts I . . . didn't. As it is, I can definitely recommend it as the continuation in a good series.

And now I need to travel an hour by car to get a copy of the fourth book from a different library system, because it went out of stock in, like, a day as far as I can tell. I'll post a review when I get my hands on a copy. ( )