I was thinking about it just now, and I realised something about Crossroads:
The tonal whiplash could be argued to be in keeping with one of its main themes. In that (as has been noted) this trilogy is a weird thematic hybrid. It's a valiant, hopeful portal fantasy with vet students combined with a very grimdark exploration of grief, survivor guilt, genocide, torture, and trauma, and those two pieces aren't smoothly blended in or reconciled with each other, they're just jammed together and stuck, unmixed... in a story about finding a world where impossible hybrid species which could not survive in nature can survive. This book about chimeras is itself a chimera.
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I was thinking about it just now, and I realised something about Crossroads:
The tonal whiplash could be argued to be in keeping with one of its main themes. In that (as has been noted) this trilogy is a weird thematic hybrid. It's a valiant, hopeful portal fantasy with vet students combined with a very grimdark exploration of grief, survivor guilt, genocide, torture, and trauma, and those two pieces aren't smoothly blended in or reconciled with each other, they're just jammed together and stuck, unmixed... in a story about finding a world where impossible hybrid species which could not survive in nature can survive. This book about chimeras is itself a chimera.