Zeroes #3: Nexus by Scott Westerfeld (2018) Book Review

 Hey everyone! How were your weekends? Mine was good. I finished the third/final book in the Zeroes Trilogy this morning so I'm here to do my review of the book. Like with my reviews of the last two books, there will be spoilers for this one, so just be aware of that if you're planning on reading these books. Let's get into it.

Nexus is the weakest book in the entire trilogy. Mainly because it did nothing to resolve any of the plot threads introduced in the first two books, such as Nate's reason for gathering the five kids in the first place. It was mentioned in the first book that he had some ultimate goal for the group but it was never revealed what that was. Other things, like Thibault and Riley's relationship, were put to the side, while others were brought back even though they'd been resolved in the second book or were just completely unnecessary to tackle in the first place.

The villain plot feels like it could be lifted from a '90s X-Men comic or from a season 2 episode of Gargoyles because it's your generic "I'm a super-powered being who hates humans so I'm gonna eradicate them with this machine, even though it'll also kill my fellow super-powered beings as well!" scenario. Swarm in the second book was just evil, wanting to kill everybody, but Piper is much more dangerous because she only wants to eradicate the portion of the human race who aren't super-powered like the Zeroes are. 

Riley and Thibault have the most struggles in this book. Thibault struggles to stay out of the Nothing, an...I don't want to say an alternate dimension because that's not quite how it's described in the book, but that's essentially what it is. Riley has to deal with her sister, Lily, betraying her and her friends and then dealing with holding the Zeroes together even after they'd broken Nate out of a supermax prison. 

Speaking of Nate, aside from what I mentioned before of his ultimate goal not being addressed, he doesn't have a whole lot to do in this book as he's either in prison, Riley is in charge of the group, or he's been bamboozled by Piper, the other "Bellwether" in the story. So there's not much going on with him here as there was in the previous two books.

Chizara and Kelsie basically revert to how they were in the first two books respectively with Kelsie afraid she's going to give in and become Swarm, even though she'd already resolved to not do that at the end of the previous book, and Chizara is back to being afraid that she's dangerous because of her ability to crash just about everything, including a person's heart, even though she'd gotten over that in the first book when she realized she could also use her power to fix things, not just destroy them. In book 2 when they had these fears, it was mainly when Glitch used her powers against the Zeroes, but Glitch is barely in this book, except for a few scenes where she's working for Piper. 

As for Ethan, most of his storyline this book revolves around his crush on Sonia Sonic, the journalist/Weird Hunter he met in the bank at the beginning of the first book, and the girl who's been a pain in the Zeroes's butts the rest of the trilogy. As I mentioned in a previous review, she's a combination of Chloe Sullivan from season 1 of Smallville and Chloe from seasons 4 through 10 of said show. Anyways, even though he's not super involved with the goings on concerning Piper, Ethan is probably my favourite character in this book and is the most relatable for me. Maybe it's because in this book The Voice is more under control and less of a detriment to Ethan than it has been in the previous two books, but I found myself sympathizing with him more than with the other characters in the book. Which is interesting because he was my least favourite character in the first two books. I still love Riley, but she's my second favourite next to Ethan in this book. 

Even though this book wasn't as strong as the previous two in the trilogy, I still really enjoyed it. It's a fun superhero trilogy with a beginning, middle, and a sort of an ending, even though that ending is very open ended as if Westerfeld, Lanagan and Biancotti intended to continue with the story, but at the last minute changed their minds and wrote a hasty ending. Especially because it's such a abrupt ending. It's still a really good book though and I really enjoyed it.

 Overall the Zeroes Trilogy was a fantastic reading experience. I love superheroes, even though I feel like they're a little overdone in movies and on TV at the moment, and this was a great superhero trilogy. The box set says Trilogy, but I could easily see the authors coming back to these characters someday. Even if it's just a novel about Ethan and Sonia since they kind of left Ethan on a cliffhanger with him having lost both his actual voice and The Voice after Piper's machine went off at the end of Nexus because I would love to know what he and Sonia end up doing together in the future. I definitely recommend this trilogy to you if you like superheroes or are a fan of the X-Men movies, because there are some similarities between the Zeroes and the X-Men.

That's it for me for today folks. I'll be back at some point, but I'm not quite sure when yet. Probably not until Wednesday when I do the next part of my DC Comics's Star Trek comic book retrospective series. And then who knows after that because aside from She-Hulk I'm not really watching anything else at the moment in terms of TV shows. So until then have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.