There is nothing as heartbreaking as a bad ending to a good series. You’ve spent so much time with the characters and you love the world, but then the ending happens. This week on Top Five Wednesday, Chelsey and I talk about the our top five worst series enders.
These are the final books that broke our hearts. There are different reasons why we chose these series. The quality of the series could have gone downhill over the course of the last few books; they either retconned the story and took in in a completely different direction, fell flat or just weren’t satisfying.
This was an interesting list to put together. There were a few series that came to mind right away, and then we got stuck on the last one.
Top Five Wednesday is a book tag started by GingerReadsLainey. Join the goodreads group to get each week’s topic and participate yourselves!
1. HEARTLAND – LAUREN BROOKE
Chelsey started reading Heartland when she was twelve and she loved it. Around book seven or eight it hit the point where Chelsey couldn’t read it anymore. Yes, the series suffered from tragedies all the time but by this point in the series these tragedies started to get off the wall ridiculous. When Chelsey picked up the eighth or nineth book and read on the back that Amy’s boyfriend Tai ends up in a coma because of a tornado that went through the barn, she gave up.
2. THE NEWSFLESH SERIES – MIRA GRANT
We absolutely adored this trilogy. The first book Feed grabbed you and took you on this wild ride and then threw you up against the wall leaving you broken. The second book destroyed your emotions. The end of the second book has the biggest, craziest reveal that you never could have seen coming. The last book in the trilogy is not bad, it just doesn’t live up to all the ones that came before it. You can see exactly where the book is headed, which is unlike the other two books. This novel also wraps up a little bit too neatly for the subject that it is trying to explore. The characters discover a giant horrible secret, and once they realize this they just kind of give up. They go off and do their own things, leaving a solid series with a lack luster ending.
I still don’t trust the CDC.
Watch our review for the first novel in the Newsflesh trilogy here.
3. NOUGHTS AND CROSSES – MALORIE BLACKMAN
I loved the first book in this series. The series was both an examination of racism and a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.Noughts and Crosses follow Sephy and Callum, two childhood friends who fall in love, only to have society tear them apart. It was an intense heartbreaking read that stayed with both Chelsey and I long after we finished the book. I remember running to the library to go and grab the rest of the books in the trilogy. The second and third books in the series didn’t have the same magic as the first one. Instead, they come off as being overly melodramatic. I don’t really remember what happened in Knife’s Edgeor Checkmate and I think that’s because I stopped caring.
4. THE CHRONICLES OF FAERIE – O.R. MELLING
First things first, I love this series because it takes place in Canada. The first two books in this series were great. The third book was alright and the fourth was a let down. When we were brainstorming for this list, we came to the conclusion that the reason the final books in this series feel like such a let down is that the first book deals with the honest to god apocalypse. Is there really a way to top the apocalypse?
5. TWILIGHT SAGA STEPHENIE MEYER
We’re getting sick about talking about Twilight, but if anything deserves to be on this list it’s this series. Out of all the Twilight Saga books, I prefer the first one. It was a guilty pleasure read, you didn’t really need to think too hard while you read it. The moment you stop and actually start thinking about the series is when all of the problems start to become apparent *cough* gender roles *cough*. I’ve been debating about going back and doing a critical reading of the Twlight Saga, but I just haven’t found the time for it yet. So here’s hoping I get around to that.
Chelsey on the other hand claims the third book as her favourite. In Eclipse, the relationships between the main characters are tested and evolve. Chelsey was never a fan of Edward and not for the usual reasons (creepy, manipulate… the list goes on), she found him boring. Jacob and Bella had a more believable relationship, there was a chemistry between the two of them. Eclipse, brought our vampires and werewolves together to fight a common enemy. Overall things were actually happening and it felt like the novel was leading up to something worth our time…. then Breaking Dawn happened.
Breaking Dawn was built up to be this epic battle, but instead all of the characters just talked everything out. On top of that, the series has built up vampirism to be something that you constantly struggle with, we were waiting to see Bella grow and become a more complicated character instead of an avatar for the reader to fill. This never happened. Turns out Bella is perfect as a vampire. A major let down.
Surprise, Stephenie Meyer decided to write a gender flip of Twilight, check out Chelsey and my review of Life and Death here.
Sometimes the ending doesn’t live up to the beginning, the trick is just remembering what you loved about the series in the first place and finding a way to move past it.
What are you top five worst series enders? Tell us about them in the comments below. Until next Wednesday, Happy Reading!
