A Ruin Great and Free is the third book in the Convergence Saga trilogy by author Cadwell Turnbull. (I’ve read and reviewed the first two books as well — here and here). The title appears more than halfway through the book in the in the midst of a monster fight as Alex (also known as Amethyst) squares off to fight her mother / not mother. Alex is crying and has blood on her face. “She is a canvas dripping with wet paint”, Turnbull writes, “a ruin, great and free.”

That scene is indicative of the whole series. Turnbull writes with great skill and knows how to turn a phrase. He knows how to build a story and people it with characters who draw you right in. And this story - the monster fight - is one of many across multiple universes that are woven together in this series.

I wrote about the first book that it was “beautifully written and keeps you turning the pages to find out what happens next - and to figure out what the heck is going on.” The same held true for the second book. The beautiful writing and interest to see how this all turns out carry through this third book too.

The mix of human stories, monster stories, god stories, and the combinations between them, across the multiverse, can be hard to keep track of for a reader. But the great writing and intriguing ideas has kept me coming back.

The books in this series are concerned with a lot of notions but how to build community seems to emerge across the series as chief among them. In A Ruin Great and Free the monsters have separated themselves from humans for safety and are building community in a rebuilt ghost town they call Moon.

The community supports itself through banding together into cooperatives to produce products they are able to magically transport into human society, hoping to keep humans from finding them. Humans don’t like monsters and there are humans who would bring violence to Moon.

Later in the book we observe a legal proceeding among the gods. It’s hard to convey what’s at stake there in a short review but suffice it to say that we learn more about the community of gods in this book than we have so far throughout the series.

The book did not end the way I thought it might, but it was a satisfying conclusion. And with that end comes the end to this series of books that is challenging to read but really well written. The series raises issues and explores concepts that really make you think.

I raised mild criticism of the second book for its dense plotting, and if anything, it’s gotten denser with this third book. But this book benefits from building a conclusion from the characters introduced in books 1 and 2. So, even though the stories come fast and furious, you aren’t trying to understand who all the characters are (though I did have to go back and skim books 1 and 2 a couple of times to jog my memory).

I don't know what I was expecting from this book, the last instalment in this sprawling, mindbending, multiverse-spanning saga, but I did not expect it to blow my mind in the very first chapter. A bold, audacious opening and from that point on, I could barely put it down.
All these lives and stories intertwining, all the monsters and humans, all the gods and mages, it all comes together for a profoundly moving conclusion I could not have predicted and which brought me to tears several times as I was reading. Turnbull writes about communities, about the way people are, together, the way they can help and destroy each other in equal measure, and he does it without ever losing sight of the power and importance of individual characters. This is a thrilling and profound conclusion to the Convergence Saga.