Bell, Book, and Key by Rysa WalkerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
It's just as well this is the last in the series, because it's started to lose me. (Don't start here, by the way. It continues straight on from the previous book without any recap or orientation for the reader. I read the previous book about a year ago, and didn't remember it well enough to avoid being disoriented at times.)
The genetic science has always been nonsense, and the different first-person narrators still all sound identical, so I frequently have to flip back to the start of the chapter to remind myself who the current "I" is. I've mentioned both of those things in reviews of earlier books. But in this one, the always-obviously-hokey manufactured religion - neither as well-organized as Scientology nor as thoroughly constructed as Mormonism - is far more successful than either, gaining what you might call market dominance in a theocratic USA. I found it implausible on multiple levels that, even with a secret Book of Prophecy capable of enriching people via stock tips and sports betting advice from a time traveler, this jumbled mishmash of bits cribbed from existing religions, vague self-help philosophy, and Ayn Rand-style Objectivist selfishness would take over so thoroughly. Not only is the secular impulse in the US extremely strong, despite the continued strength of civil religion there, but people with an existing religious tradition - Catholics, say, or Mormons - often have that as a powerful part of their identity, so it isn't just a religion but more like an ethnicity, and they'd be unlikely to give it up for something as nonsensical as the Cyrist religion. (Nor have I ever found it plausible that Cyrism could arise in the Middle Ages without being suppressed; this is something that's only ever touched on lightly, no doubt because to write the Cyrist scripture in authentic medieval language is something beyond the ability of either the fictional founder or the actual author.)
The whole thing reads to me as the work of someone who doesn't actually understand religion, or religious people, very well at all, writing for other people who don't understand religion either and using it as a bogeyman. Even when civil religion was a lot stronger than it currently is, a truly theocratic USA was never realistically on the cards; the whole structure of the government is set up to prevent it, and as we've recently seen, is surprisingly successful at preventing dictatorship and the complete dominance of any one viewpoint.
Even setting all of that aside, the way the timeline changes worked was deeply confusing and, I suspect, not entirely consistent. For example, (view spoiler). Earlier books have been complex, but I've followed them fairly easily; this one feels a lot more jumbled and confusing.
I'll close by mentioning the things that did work for me. As previously, the text is well edited, and even in the pre-publication version I had from Netgalley I only noticed a couple of small errors. (Probably because it's had a great many eyes over it, judging from the acknowledgements.) Also as in previous books, the history is well researched without beating the reader over the head with the research bat. It is pretty obvious which characters are real historical characters and which are fictional; the real characters are mostly seen at a distance, whereas the fictional ones get closeups and dialog. But there is an authentic sense of history, of the difference between historical periods, and that's a definite strength of this series and this author overall.
Disappointing, then, that there were a couple of things that didn't work so well for me, and (combined with the weaknesses I've been noting all along) dragged my rating down to three stars.
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