Unfortunately, this became a hate read about a quarter into the book.

Each new entry of the "Chronicles of the Avatar" series is lower in quality than it's predecessor, which wasn't much of a problem when we were at book 2 or 3. However, book 5 has little redeemable qualities.

Unlike Yee, Ribay was tasked with filling the gaps of the live of an avatar that we already know well: we know how his story begins and ends. I confess I was never particularly interested in knowing more about Roku, but I was still excited over this book. Yet, somehow, Ribay managed to turn Roku into an incredibly naive Avatar, who is unable to see how his *obviously evil friend* is evil. 

Randy Ribay's writing style is too repetitive and shallow, and it really breaks the immersion. I also don't understand what's the point of jumping chapters/POV every 2 pages or so, it's distracting.

He insists on explaining things that no one asked explanations for: "Why does the fire nation say 'flamey-o' in Aang's timeline?": 

Gyatso made that up

. "Where does exceptional bending, like the blue flames, come from?": 

we still don't know, but here's a cool cave where you can do all that and more with no effort.

. He also went back to retcon what was perhaps Sozin's only good deed: 

making it so that he actually didn't have good intentions behind gifting his head peace to Roku

. Because evil people can only do evil things!

The only good things to come out of this are Gyatso and Malaya. However, the latter

had to die by Sozin's hand for some reason

.

In short: Ribay's writing is shallow, and so are his characters. The pacing is terrible, and the story is nonsensical.