Downloaded this morning, and finished just now.

I enjoyed the trilogy, but found that the last few chapters were weak. This was partly because they felt a bit preachy, and partly because Nona herself becomes a sort of narrative device, zipping from pillar to post with hardly a pause for breath as she keeps the reader abreast of all the goings on at the different fronts during the final war of all against all.

Update:
I've now read it a second time, and I've gone back and reread the first two. So here's a few thoughts on the whole thing. It will contain spoilers

I believe this is Mark Lawrence's third trilogy in the fantasy vein. While I still prefer the first of them, The Broken Empire, I very much enjoyed this one. Lawrence has chosen to hinge the work on a female character, who we follow growing up, and coming into her inherited super-powers. These have been passed down to her by ancestors of four different 'races' who arrived on the planet only to discover that the original inhabitants, accurately predicting that all life would be wiped out in the future, had already left. Scattered over the world are powerful artefacts that they left behind them, and although the reader never really finds out what they are -or is even sure about their provenance - these objects play an important role in the story.

Between fire and ice, Lawrence goes for ice: as the sun weakens, so the world freezes over. It is only kept inhabitable by a satellite, a moon, which is, in fact, a lens that concentrates the light rays that fall on the planet, and heats up an ever diminishing corridor within which the majority of the inhabitants live. The society that has developed is close to the fantasy generic, with peasants, aristocrats, rampaging marauders, an assassin's guild, and an emperor weakened by family feud and intrigue. One of the emperor's sisters is the main villain of the story.

The central character is as dangerous and as blood-besotted as was Jaime of the Broken Empire. She begins her career of mayhem by tearing apart one of the children in her village. Quite why she is allowed to run about after that incident - 'he tried to hit me: look, this was inside him' - is unclear, but when she single-handedly slaughters a squad of soldiers and the mage who accompanied them, the villagers decide they've had enough of her, and give her away to a conveniently passing buyer of children. Caged with several others on the back of a donkey cart, Nona makes her way into the wide world.

She next slaughters the son of a prominent aristocrat. She is saved from the gallows in extremis by the abbess of the local nunnery - who just happened to be passing by. This sets up the main intrigue of the first book, and of much of the second. The abbess fends off increasingly vicious attempts to destroy her young charge, while Nona herself develops her powers, deals with the squabbles that are the day-to-day coinage of the English boarding-school story, and introduces us to the other main actors in the tale.

As the trilogy is rolled out, the story widens out until Nona is finally tasked with saving the world. She may be the Chosen One foreseen by an ancient prophecy, uniting all four of the tribes in her one person. Or perhaps not. Lawrence is nicely ambiguous about the status of the prophecy: the abbess claims that it was invented by a couple of clerics a few decades back, in order to give hope to the ordinary people, and paper over the cracks in a social order that otherwise might easily disintegrate. In any case, there are other claimants to the title, both of them friends of Nona's, and fellow novices at the nunnery.

Lawrence writes well. His fight scenes are gripping, and he builds a number of set pieces that hold the attention. One example from the first book is the trial and ordeal of the abbess, who quite literally sacrifices her right hand in order to save Nona from execution. She echoes this in a second trial at the end of the following tome: this time round, it is Nona who saves the abbess.

However, he does thread the book through with portentous and oracular pronouncements. It's not made clear where these come from, but we may assume that they are interjections by the scribe who redacts this tale for the 'book of the ancestor' - for Nona's doings will be made suitable for publication by the Church, and made to reinforce the underlying message, which is 'Love one another, and don't ever mess with the nuns'. This is presumably why, at the end of book 3, Nona, while wreaking an extraordinarily bloody revenge on her most dangerous enemy, forgives the others and preaches a short sermon on Love, Peace and Fraternity. It may also be why she forswears her main man - I have taken a vow, you know.

Nona herself is a somewhat messy character. Never given to eloquence, she is allowed to spin the yarns of her childhood in the high style - an authorial voice rather than that of a nine-year old. At other times she falls apart - particularly at the end, where she keeps being yanked from one body to another. It gets to be difficult to tell her apart from her friends - perhaps she is just one aspect of the triple goddess made up of herself, Arabella and Zole.

Lawrence doesn't so much avoid the traps of the genre as cheerfully tumble into them. The deadly collective of assassins are put to rout by a trio of fifteen-year-old girls, with a little help from one of their teachers. Later, the baddest of them dies after Nona slams a door in his face. The villain does that villainous thing of giving a lengthy explanation of everything she plans on doing, thus enabling Nona to thwart her with ease. And the apocalypse is averted. (Somewhat ironically, Theresa May's message of environmental hostility towards the immigrant is made manifest in the closing pages, and, accompanied by a little nudge, it solves the problem. Make what you wish of that).

All in all, the trilogy was enjoyable. I think Mark Lawrence leaves enough hanging threads to allow him to come back for more. If he does, I'll buy it.