Supernova
Year: 2019
Author: Marissa Meyer
Length: 992 minutes / 16.53 hours
If there’s one thing I appreciate about Marissa Meyer’s writing, it’s that she has a conclusive ending in three to four books. The Lunar Chronicles wrapped up everything nice and tight in four books, and the Renegades trilogy does the same thing with the last book, Supernova. After all, I enjoy reading a tight set of three or four books instead of a meandering series with dozens of entries. That being said, I wasn’t a fan of the epilogue in this book, but at least everything else concluded in a way that made sense for the narrative arc of the whole trilogy.
In the first two books of the Renegades trilogy, I had some assumptions about the big questions Meyer presented to the reader. Who really killed Adrian’s mom? How would Nova eventually be found out? Who is Phobia? While Archenemies really hit it out of the park by introducing the moral gray area of super-powered humans, I was a little disappointed with how this book answered the remaining big questions of the trilogy. At least Meyer actually answered them instead of letting them remain mysterious.
While there wasn’t a lot of evidence to back up my theory, I thought that Adrian’s mom would have died accidentally after being exposed to Max’s power. That’s what made sense to me. However, the canon answer for her death definitely works and has a much more meaningful explanation despite it being slightly paradoxical and almost a non sequitur in my opinion. In the end, Supernova completes a fantastic series that asks hard questions about superheroes that other series like Invincible and The Boys have managed to do in their own right.
Answering the questions of the Renegades trilogy while also faltering in the epilogue, I give Supernova 4.0 stars out of 5.
