I'm Back with a Rant

Ending Rant

*This post has been updated on December 16, 2015 

So this has been happening a lot lately and I am getting sick of it. You’re in the process of reading a really good book and then you get to the ending and its basically just trash. Like it sucks compared to the rest of the book. I know that may sound a bit harsh, but this really ticks me off. The ending is rushed and just awful.

It really sucks. It sucks for readers. It sucks for reviewers. And it just has to suck for writers knowing they didn’t put their best effort into the ending. It sucks for everyone because the reader is disappointed, the reviewer has to write a bad review, and the author has to see their book being trashed. No one wins at all.

Why are all of these books and series ending like this? Why are they refusing to take their time to finish the book the way it deserves? I know after the climax it’s supposed to go downhill, but I don’t think it’s supposed to crash and burn.

Most of the endings I keep seeing are rushed. The author spends the entire 500 page novel building up to this moment and it ends up lasting about three paragraphs. That is horrible story telling. It’s like Romeo and Juliet, meet, fall in love, and then die because they can’t be together in only five paragraphs. That’s not how it happens. That is a long ass novel. Trust me, I can speak from experience. If there was a five paragraph version I would have gladly read it instead of the play they forced us to read in English that was at least a hundred pages. If Shakespeare can make a story like that be hundreds of pages, the ending at least ten (I really have no idea how long it was, but Act 5 was twenty pages long), then an author can add a bit more details to how they defeated the enemy/demons/resolved the conflict(s).

Why does this happen? Do they have to rush to meet their deadline? Is that what this whole thing is about? The author already pitched the idea to their publisher and the publisher bought it before so and so had written two pages of it and they had to have it done before a set date so it was completely rushed and crappy. Kind of like that last run-on sentence you just read.

If you can’t tell, I am being incredibly sarcastic because this just happened to me. Not once, but twice. I just read an amazing book that happened to be the last book in a series and finished it yesterday. The ending completely sucked. I was so mad about it. Five books building up to this critical moment that the protagonists spent the entire series trying to stop and it ended in like three pages. Now, me being the reviewer, has to decided whether to write a review for this book that I waited for over three years for or just leave it at this rant. And it really sucks because the author of this series is one of my top three all-time favorite authors. I am just so disappointed in him.

And then I decide to hop onto Wattpad because I was reading this good book by a teen author so it could cheer me up. But no, I can’t even put it into words how the ending made me feel. It didn’t fit the rest of the book at all. THere’s this strong, snarky heroine, but she lets people walk all over her once they discovered her identity. She kept apologizing to others because she wanted some privacy. Now that made me mad because that didn’t go with her character at all. She would sit there and cuss all of those people she called friends out earlier in the book rather than apologizing for keeping a secret identity.

Authors need to start taking time on endings. They are the most important part of a book. They can’t be rushed or else that is all that is in the reader’s mind. Both of these stories were really good, but now the ending totally overshadows everything else that happened in the beginning. That’s another reason why I’m reluctant to write a review for these types of books. I’m not that mean of a person to write a horrible review and not put some good things in there. If it’s that bad, I just won’t write it.

I think I’m just going to pick up Obsidian again (for the seventh time) to cheer me up because I know it can’t let me down. I had to get this off of my chest because I’m disappointed. What are some endings that you hated for otherwise good books? Are there any trash endings you wanted to get off of you chest? Leave them in the comments below, so we can stuff our faces with ice cream and cry over how disappointing they were together. Don’t judge me.