A brilliant finale to an excellent trilogy. Whenever I'm pitching the Summoner series to people, I usually simplify it as "Harry Potter meets Pokemon", though that skips a lot of the things which I particularly love about the series, and this book is no exception. All the battle tactics. The latter part of the book fulfilled all my military tactics needs, and you can definitely see why Fletcher has such a fearsome reputation as a warrior at Vocans. There's plenty of angst too and the death toll is just the right balance between lots of people dying to convey how hard-won a victory is and a few deaths that deal one heck of an emotional whammy: I always count it as a win when a book has me rereading sentences because "you did not just kill off that character, dammit!"

The Battlemage is the third book in The Summoner series and in this one, Fletcher and his demons, Ignatius and Athena as well as his best friend have to work their way out of the Ether they’re trapped in (without dying), and then catapult into the final battle between their home and the orcs trying to take it.

I really enjoyed this book as always - and it had been almost two years since I read the second book The Inquisition. It did take me a while to connect all the characters and what had happened again (but thankfully I watched a couple of reviews of The Inquisition before starting to refamiliarise myself with what had happened, and this definitely helped).

I just love the world and the different demons that I encounter every time and how all the demons really end up grabbing a special piece of my heart - such as Sheldon who looked after them in the ether just because he wanted to, to the immediate care I felt for Pria when Othello infused her. Ignatius as always was amazing, and he actually became Toothless in this book which I’ve been saying he reminded me off the entire time. I absolutely love Athena and how she cares for Fletcher.

I liked how things happened once they got back to Hominium, though the prejudice around dwarves and elves and how useless King Harold was most of the time did make my blood boil a lot. I liked seeing Fletcher go back to his place of birth, bringing his own little mixed-race species village with him. I love those kind of nice, quiet scenes of a village being built (blame my Sim-loving, Castleville playing heart for that one) so I was sad we didn’t get loads of time there but the battles were pretty intense and really well-written.

There was a pint about 80% in to the book where I couldn’t figure out how Taran Matharu was going to wrap up the story because so much was happening, and it seemed like there was no end. There were definitely points here where I had a lump in my throat too like when Atilla’s demon healed Ignatius before disappearing, and pretty much every time Fletcher described the love he felt from Athena and Ignatius.

This was really great, and I’m very excited to see there’s another book coming because I had no idea!