Lost in My Library

Last week, I wrote a discussion on why I don't like series finales, or at least not normally as much as I like the rest of the series. That got me thinking about specific examples of series finales that I've especially disliked or liked, and ones that stood out from the rest of the series for one reason or another. But I just didn't have room in my post to talk about specifics without getting totally off track. So here's a selection of series finales that have stood out to me, broken down into four categories. This is mostly based on how these books have compared to the rest of the books in the series, though a couple on here were definitely particularly good or bad. And remember - me thinking that a book didn't measure up to the rest of the series doesn't mean I didn't like it on its own! JUST NOT GREAT These are the books that are not only my least favorite of the series, but just make my overall impression of the series that much worse. B...

There's something that I've been thinking about for a while, probably since I read WINTER , the last book in the Lunar Chronicles, almost two years ago. (Or, more accurately, the last novel - there have been a few add-ons since then.) I love the whole series, and I gave all of them five stars, but there was something about that last book that just didn't quite live up to the other three for me. After that, I started thinking about it more generally. In so many cases, no matter how much I like it, the last book in a series is my least favorite. The Firebird trilogy. The Infernal Devices. The Hunger Games. The Wrath & the Dawn. Wolf by Wolf. Graceling. For some reason, it just doesn't measure up to the rest. But why? Are series finales really so consistently different from the other books in a series? I think they might be, simply because they have to wrap everything up. In so many cases, this makes the book pretty different than its predecessors. Sometimes, ...