When you read a book and it disappoints you

Sometimes you’ll pick up a book and it hooks you enough that you push through to the end.  But then the ending makes you say, “WHAT?  NO!  That’s just wrong!”

This happened to me recently; a book I read ticked me off.  I’m not going to say the title or author because I don’t want to shame the individual.   She probably won’t ever read my blog, but I’m going to be courteous anyway.

Anyway, the ending irritated me.  I felt like the twists were not foreshadowed well enough, and

I felt like the reason the hero gave for loving the heroine was a total mismatch with the kind of relationship they had.  For most of the book, the hero and the heroine were at odds with each other, and there was even some question as to whether the hero might actually be the villain.  The hero stonewalled and sought to thwart the heroine every step of the way. With that kind of relationship, did I believe it when the hero told the heroine that he loved her from the first moment he saw her?  No!  No, I didn’t!  He did not love her from the first moment he saw her.  His behavior showed none of that.  There was one scene at the 2/3^rd point when he was subtly protective, but that wasn’t enough.  There was a sequence when they were together and told each other stories, but that was never presented in scene, only as exposition and narration, so it never felt real to me as a reader.  

What would have been more believable is if the hero had said, “I hated you when you came, and I was determined to fight you, but you won me over anyway, and now I can’t imagine life without you.”   And with all the conflict between them early in their acquaintance, the scene where they confessed their love needed a lot more rehashing of previous events.  They needed to explain to each other when they first noticed each other as a romantic prospect, when they first started to love each other, what they thought, what they feared, when they doubted, etc.  That all needed to be explained in order to make the ending feel satisfying and believable.

I also had a hard time believing that the villain was the villain when that was revealed.  The villain was the only person who was kind to the heroine in a very hostile social environment.  The environment stayed hostile for a long time, and the villain was friendly for a long time.  There was just one little scene where the villain snapped a bit and let down the mask.  But because of the villain’s pattern of kind behavior, this seemed like an aberration, rather than showing true colors.  I had a hard time believing that the villain would have the moral courage to show friendliness to the heroine when everyone else was determined to isolate the heroine socially for so long.

There’s a problem when you get to the end of the book and you’re not convinced that the twists are really the truth.  It means there’s been inadequate characterization or foreshadowing.  In this case, I think it was inadequate characterization.  The truth didn’t fit the larger pattern of behavior for the character.

As you can see, when I get done with a book and I don’t like the ending, it helps me to analyze what went wrong in it that left me dissatisfied.   It gives me a little more insight as to what is required for a good story to work.  Frequently I end up asking myself, “Does my story make that mistake too?”  And if so, that becomes an opportunity to improve my own writing.