Quick Disclaimer: Any Way the Wind Blows is book three in the Simon Snow series by Rainbow Rowell. If you have not yet read book one (Carry On by Rainbow Rowell) you will want to start there and may find spoilers for book one and two in the review below. You can find a review for Carry On here: null.
"In Carry On, Simon Snow and his friends realized that everything they thought they understood about the world might be wrong. And in Wayward Son, they wondered whether everything they understood about themselves might be wrong.
In Any Way the Wind Blows, Simon and Baz and Penelope and Agatha have to decide how to move forward.
For Simon, that means deciding whether he still wants to be part of the World of Mages -- and if he doesn't, what does that mean for his relationship with Baz? Meanwhile Baz is bouncing between two family crises and not finding any time to talk to anyone about his newfound vampire knowledge. Penelope would love to help, but she's smuggled an American Normal into London, and now she isn't sure what to do with him. And Agatha? Well, Agatha Wellbelove has had enough.
Any Way the Wind Blows takes the gang back to England, back to Watford, and back to their families for their longest and most emotionally wrenching adventure yet.
This book is a finale. It tells secrets and answers questions and lays ghosts to rest.
Carry On was conceived as a book about Chosen One stories; Any Way the Wind Blows is an ending about endings. About catharsis and closure, and how we choose to move on from the traumas and triumphs that try to define us."
--- Summary Via Goodreads
Review By: anonymous
5/5 Stars
This book was a fantastic finale to the Simon Snow series. It was 600 pages of young adults finally figuring themselves out (I swear I thought I was going to kill Simon Snow multiple times throughout this book), and 600 pages of me cheering every time there was a kissing scene (and, boy, were there quite a bit of kissing scenes. It was amazing). While the first book focused on romance, and the second book focused on expanding the world of magical beings, the third book focused on the relationships of the characters. Which is a major win for every reader that’s been mentally screaming at the characters to figure their relationships out and kiss already. There’s even emotion-relationship stuff before one-fourth of the book is over! That’s a record among the Simon Snow books! This ending was also an ending that solved every semblance of a problem brought up in previous books (albeit in some very rushed-feeling ways for at least one of them). This is also an amazing book for anyone who likes reading absolute behemoths of books, because it’s about 600 pages. Although, I would like to say that I do not recommend reading it in one go unless you have quite a bit of free time. In other news, there’s more false cults in this book! Of course, the main characters have to infiltrate said cult because they can’t simply tear down cults from the outside. Eventually, they find the person they’re looking for, before stopping a huge cult scandal. Now that I think about it, it seems there’s a theme of falsely motivated cults in the Simon Snow books, maybe there’s a metaphor there? Overall, the Simon Snow series has been a joy to read, with books that had me cheering for the main characters all the way through. Plus, it explored some concepts that I didn’t know I was itching to have explored (like applying the nuances of language to magic).