Hmmmm...well, this was a bit of a let down if I'm being honest. It felt like a convoluted mess - I really didn't like Katherine, the prose of the book was markedly different I felt, and the pacing was poor.

The conversations were very king and drawn out. Especially the ones taking place on the alien planet. They were very one sided at times due to the use of the alien language, which I personally found irritating and it really disturbed the flow of the book.

I did like the epilogue, so I suppose that's something 🤷‍♀️

This book has a slightly different and wider focus to the first two books. It contains quite a bit of social and political commentary and is thoughtfully written. This has been an excellent sci fi trilogy!

A decent round-up of the series, although I felt it was less pacy/driven than the previous two. However - some really interesting ideas / storylines, and a good conclusion.

This novel is book 3 of The Themis Files; The book certainly felt a lot slower then the first two and was sadly considerably more predictable.

The story starts exactly where the previous book left off but soon jumps nine years ahead, from here the two stories progress side by side leading to the obvious conclusion. The author has lost none of his touch with characters as again new characters fleshed out very quickly and embroiled in the plot right away.

There is humour, action and some tragedy along the way. An enjoyable book and conclusion to the series, just a bit too slow to get to the obvious end.

I really looked forward to the final book in the Themis trilogy and it surpassed my expectations. I was so excited to see where they would go at the end of the second book and loved the new world of aliens. It was good to explore how the human race would cope after the events in the second book and to understand why it happened. The book delivered a super imaginative tale full of gripping action and a fantastic ending. I was sad to finish it and will definitely read anything else that Sylvain writes.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone. I have reviewed it on Goodreads and will do on Amazon once it is available for review.

[book:Only Human|36491925] concludes a trilogy definitely worth reading. But, please, binge read it rather than waiting two years to get your hands on the last installment, like I did. I am convinced that such a large gap inbetween books is responsible for my three star rating.

Sylvain Neuvel has written a very imaginative and intriguing story that due to its format (interview transcripts) is also very fast paced. Great if you are looking for something to get you out of a reading slump, it is a series that enhances your admiration (and dismay) of life, the universe and everything.

Also, it is fantastic that The Themis Files are very clearly written by a linguist. :)

(Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy!)

Only Human had a tough act to follow: Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods were excellent, original, innovative, thought-provoking and fun books. The concluding volume in this trilogy was good, but it wasn’t quite as good as the first two. However I did enjoy it, and I definitely respect the fact that the author wrote a book that was connected to the first two by characters and plot, and yet was also completely different.

Rose Franklin first uncovered a metal hand in the ground. Then she put a robot together. Then she faced an invasion and discovered a way to chase it off. Then we skip forward another ten years. That’s another thing I loved about this series – how unafraid it was to make big time jumps. Most sequels pick up where the last left off, but this series goes jump jump jump into the future and into new plots. Rose, Vincent, and Eva have spent ten years on an alien planet and now they’ve come home.

I was intrigued by the prospect of an alien culture. I think Neuvel does a nice job of depicting what it might be like to live in a world that is like ours, but everything from language to cutlery to government is so foreign. Rose and Vincent are still great characters, but Eva was a lot harder to love. I like the idea, the concept behind her – she grows up on an alien planet and now Earth isn’t home to her – but as a person she’s just grating. Not a fan.

All in all, a satisfying end to the series.

A superb ending to a trilogy that I have loved to read, I have been eager for each book to be released and had them on preorder in advance. I loved Sleeping Giants and found Waking Gods not quite as strong but felt that Only Human picked it back up and finished the trilogy on a high.

After the cliffhanger of book 2, I was excited to dive back in and rejoin our characters as they faced the next chapter of their journey. However, I felt this instalment was a much slower pace than the previous two and it was a little disappointing overall.

I have always enjoyed the interview and audio log style formatting of this series and I do feel that it was back to form on this one. I enjoyed how it moved between the two timelines of the groups time on the alien planet and their return to earth. While book one was fascinating, book two was action packed and brutal, this final instalment was definitely more political. It really held up a bit of a mirror to how we as humans like to group themselves and how damaging that can be.

I felt the character stories were a lot more focused in this book. In fact I feel there was a much greater focus on Vincent than anyone else. I like Vincent’s voice, it is a very natural character. He is far from the contouring hero and I like that. For me, there was definitely a great hole left by the absence of certain characters who were personal favourites in the previous two books. Eva was also a little underwhelming, we follow her growing up but the jumps in her age don’t really give the reader a sense of her developing her own personality and she is kind of written off as a surly teenager even at 19!

Rose is a great character but she really takes more of a background in this one, and with that we loose a lot of the Science aspects I found super fascinating in the first book. This also means I was disappointed in the world building. We get very little disctiption of the alien world. Those moments we do get are fantastic but as we are more focused on the human aspect and political aspects of the characters time there we never get a solid feel for the place. I just wanted more aliens and more giant robots!

I really liked the plot, the story itself was interesting, though it could have included much more giant robot fight scenes. It was defiantly intriguing and it did keep the pages turning, just not as fevourishly as books one and two. I do think it was a fitting ending to the series, I was satisfied with it. I am in two-minds as it if it was a little too “happily ever after” for my tastes but I definitely felt this had a clear and consice ending that didn’t let down the series as a whole.

So, being the third in a series it's hard to review without spoilers, but this wildly inventive series comes to a thrilling, action packed, yet intensely personal conclusion. It deftly examines familial bonds, what it means to be family with themes of sacrifice and loyalty to each other and our nations.

Wider in scope than the claustrophobic first book and more focussed than the second this was enjoyable and the events will stay in your mind long after you finish the book.

Very interesting science fiction, a real jolt to the epistolary / found document format.

This has been one of my favourite science fiction series and this final instalment is a really fitting end. As it is the third book in a trilogy, I cannot really speak to the plot without some serious spoilers for the previous two books, but the story goes in some fascinating directions and some characters have some very satisfying arcs that I really enjoyed. I will say that I felt some of the social commentary here was a little heavy handed at times, but it was justified and didn't detract from the narrative. All in all, The Themis Files is a truly wonderful trilogy and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered if we are all alone in the universe.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Okay so I've been waiting to finish this trilogy for what feels like a very long time. The first book had me hooked - I thought it was immeasurably interesting, smart and fun. The second book lost some if its wow factor, compounded by that cliff hanger ending... And this book? Well, I'm glad the series is over, despite my overall enjoyment of the books.

For one thing, the purely dialogue form makes it hard to engage fully. The author is asking the reader to do too much work - we have to conjure character development, setting and scenery, building tensions and conflicts all through wry conversation and journal entries. This felt new and witty in the first book, especially as we were seeing characters meet, interact and come up against each other so we were learning along with the characters. In this third instalment, a lot of them start to sound the same - irreverent, sarcastic, injecting humour into any and every situation.

It also felt like the author had a treatise he wanted to put forth, and he created a novel around it. There are incredibly long moments of monologue and philosophising which, if they'd been broken up by anything other than more speech, would probably have been more appealing. It's incredibly hard to gain the sense of global conflict and strain needed for this book when we are so granularly focused on the individual characters' conversations (which, as mentioned above, are usually diluted with sporadic drops of comic comebacks).

Finally, the resolution(s) all felt very quick and easy, which was kind of disappointing though I am pleased with how the story ended. It was by no means a "and it was all a dream" scenario, but given the broader political issues we were being hammered with throughout the novel, I was surprised they weren't brought into the conclusion.

For what has ended up being quite a damning review, I truly did enjoy this trilogy - Sylvain Neuvel is incredibly innovative, clever and a sharp writer. For a competitive market, he wrote sci-fi in such a way that it felt new and exciting, and I would highly recommend that anyone who hasn't does at least take a peak at the first book in the trilogy...

I did enjoy this book but i think that out of the three in this series, this was my least favourite.
Personally, i am not the biggest fan of trilogies and the fact that i got this far is a testament to how good the Themis Files series actually is.
The characters are fantastic and developed really well and the world building is consistently good and convincing. I also really like the writing style and find that it flows really nicely and is easy to sink into!

My biggest gripe with this book was the pacing, it did feel very slow in part but definitely picked up toward the end.

Overall i really enjoyed the series as a whole but was not blown away by this book in particular.

Unfortunately I have to agree with several other reviewers, this book fell a bit flat especially as a sequel to what came before. I was so excited when this ARC came through Netgalley- after reading Waking Gods I was keen to know what happened next. I'm not sure if maybe this conclusion was rushed or if the author is just ready to move on to other projects but I was let down.

I had not read the previous books (shocking I know!) so I didn’t have any expectations other than to hopefully have a good read, I have read other reviews since finishing that are not exactly glowing and I can see why if they having been waiting for a conclusion to this trilogy as that doesn’t really happen, I would agree with some readers that it’s not really sci-fi but that is always open to interpretation. I enjoyed the story, I may go back and read the first 2 books and see if that changes my opinion but as is stands it wasn’t time wasted but it also wasn’t the most gripping read

This is the third and final book in the Themis Files series by Sylvain Neuvel, a series where I loved the first book, liked the second, and was apprehensive going into the third. Fortunately, I enjoyed this more than the second book so I am so pleased that I decided to finish the series (aside from the two novellas).

I’ll start with the negative; for me, the worst thing about this series, and this book in particular, was the pacing. This third book had a great beginning and an amazing ending but the middle was painfully slow at times.

On the plus side, the characters were well developed, the plot was exciting and the world building was convincing. Aspects of the ending was quite cheesy but it suited the rest of the story and leaves scope for further books in this universe.

Overall, I really enjoyed this third instalment and would recommend this series as a whole. It’s not often that I actually finish a series so it is a testament to Sylvain Neuvel’s writing and imagination that he managed to keep me interested until the end.