It’s been quite a while since I’ve read the Harley Merlin series by Bella Forrest. Part of that was because the 9th book disappeared from online stores and my local bookstore but part of it was also a lack of excitement admittedly. The 8th book felt like it took forever to get to but it felt like it should have been the climactic end to the series. But a conscious decision was made to have Harley Merlin and The Mortal Pact be the finale of the series and I don’t think that was a good decision.
Character Development
2/10
The Mortal Pact doesn’t really have much going on when it comes to character development. The main reason is because most of the major character arcs were either completed in prior books or teased earlier and never really explored much. The side characters really lived up to that name as they felt like filler rather than important and relevant to the story. None of them had much focus let alone changed in any way except for Finch and even then, just barely. Harley as the protagonist, weirdly enough, felt lacking in any real development as a character in her own finale. She started as a courageous heroine willing to sacrifice herself to save the world if need be and that never fluctuated or changed. It created a very uninteresting situation when the main character doesn’t have to fundamentally change or confront something about themselves to succeed. Whether or not Harley Merlin could be considered a victim of the “Mary Sue” trope is up for debate, but the way this book ends really makes it hard to deny.
Probably one of the worst aspects of this entire series was Katherine as the antagonist. In the first few books, she’s made out to be this charismatic, clever and incredibly powerful villain that Harley must defeat but only one of those traits is accurate and even then, a bit questionable. She’s a great example of an antagonist that sounds great until you actually see them and worse, when they actually talk. Katherine acts like a bratty teenager more than an intimidating goddess that we’re meant to expect at this point. Either she’s secretly a genius whenever we don’t see her or everyone else is really incompetent.
There are three POV characters in The Mortal Pact which areHarley, Katherine and, for some reason that becomes abundantly clear by the end for not good reasons, Finch. This may be a matter of taste, but I found him incredibly annoying and unlikeable as a character whose character arc really did end like 2 books ago. There’s almost too much of a spotlight put upon him which normally would’ve had certain implications but somehow the reality was so much worse and unsatisfying.
Plot
2/10
There’s not a lot that can really be said outside of this book really didn’t need to exist. It was a very long and drawn out story with so much unnecessary filler that easily could have been added in to the previous book. It’s hard not to draw parallels to between how Harley Merlin’s series ended to how the Harry Potter series ended except Forrest chose to have what could only be described as the most unsatisfying end to the series’ main conflict. It’s hard not to see that the feeling of despair that was trying to be created in The Mortal Pact didn’t really work as it was another case of us being more told about it than shown.
Worldbuilding
2/10
There weren’t a lot of clear and defined rules to how Chaos worked in the Harley Merlin series but The Mortal Pact really seemed to not care about any of them. Soft Magic Systems are, in my opinion, usually one of the best and easier systems to use as a writer as it gives soft rules to work around that allow for creativity but hard enough boundaries to create tension and conflict. Ever since Harley’s suppressor was broken halfway through the series, that idea of a Soft Magic System was really being stretched to its limits but The Mortal Pact just threw it all out the window. Things were just conveniently allowed to happen just for the sake of the plot going in a very specific direction. The concept of Chaos felt even more confusing and not in a clever way that the name “Chaos” could have been done.
Writing Style
6/10
If anything can be said, Forrest does know how to write in a way that still keeps the book easy to read despite how boring the plot and the dialogue are. The only way I can describe the dialogue was that it was stuff ripped straight out of like early 2000s teenager dialect. Outside of Harley, the other characters talking all sort of blended together into what could only be described as generic teenage lingo which was more annoying than endearing. It certainly didn’t help that this applied to the adult characters as well, especially Katherine. A lot of which felt like it was thrown in without real consideration for the character or the situation.
The chapters were dense with several paragraphs that were reminiscent of a student padding the length of an assignment to hit a certain word count. There were so many times that was just repetition of what the characters were already observing or feeling that also somehow did not give enough information to really understand or care what was happening. It was incredibly evident in the climax (if it can be called that) as the majority of the action was being described by a character in a very uninteresting manner. It really didn’t need to be this long and could have easily been part of book 8.
Score
3/10
Raph's Cozy Musings 