It’s the first Monday of the month. And we all know what that means . . .

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• What book(s) did you finish reading (or listening to) since last month’s update?

• What are you currently reading and/or listening to?

• What’s the next book on your To Be Read stack/list?

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  I have finished reading . . . absolutely nothing in the past month. I started the audiobook of Carol Cox’s Love in Disguise on September 3. I stopped listening to it a couple of weeks ago. Once I finish writing An Honest Heart, I may pull it up on my Kindle and finish reading it. There are two main reasons I haven’t finished listening to it, and they’re both pretty much equally weighted.

  First, I’m more than a third but not quite halfway through the book and the heroine has barely met the hero. Sure, it’s an intriguing plot—in the 1880s, Ellie goes undercover to Arizona for the Pinkerton Agency to try to solve a string of silver thefts. She’s going dressed as an older widow (her background is in the theater). But the young woman who’s already a trained agent ends up not going, so Ellie becomes both the niece and the aunt, trying to ingratiate herself to the small community so she can solve the crime. The town has potential to be a great setting with quirky secondary characters. The plot has potential to provide both gripping suspense and wonderful humor. The romance has the potential to be fraught with fabulous tension—after all, she can’t reveal her true identity to the hero. However, at nearly halfway through the book, the narrative (well-crafted though it may be) has pretty much all been centered around Ellie and her decision making. She lost her job. Oh, no, what will she do? She can be a detective. But they don’t want a young woman. Oh, no, what will she do? She can disguise herself as an older woman. She now has a job, but the other young woman who is supposed to travel with her and teach her the job now isn’t going with her. Oh, no, what will she do? She arrives in town and discovers the (male) mine owners aren’t going to pay much attention to (or talk to) an older woman. Oh, no, what will she do? The telegraph operator tells everyone she’s expecting her niece to arrive. Oh, no, what will she do? She decides to dress up as the niece as well as playing the aunt. The first time she goes out dressed as the niece, the shady marshal flirts with her. Oh, no, what will she do?

  Obviously, I’m a bit over-the-top with my description, but after a couple of weeks away from the book, that’s all I remember about it. Other than the fact the hero is a mine owner whose silver has been stolen, I don’t remember anything about him.

  The second reason I stopped listening to it is because of the narrator. She sounds like she’s thirteen years old and is reading this book to a five-year-old. In addition to having a very juvenile-sounding voice, she has a tendency to mispronounce words and put inflections in strange places in words and phrases/sentences. And I’m afraid that she may be part of the reason why I’m not connecting with Ellie—because her silly voice and inflections make me feel like the character is silly and immature.

  Now, I’m not saying that the book isn’t well written. Carol Cox has a wonderful, breezy writing style. However, when I pick up a romance novel, I have two major expectations: (1) the hero and his development will be given at least as much attention as the heroine—after all, I’m reading a romance novel to vicariously fall in love with him right along with the heroine; and (2) the hero and the heroine will meet and start building their relationship early in the story, preferably by the third chapter. As I tell writers in every workshop I teach on writing romances and in feedback in every contest I judge: the “meet” is what gets the plot of the story rolling. In a true romance novel, none of the rest of the subplots or characters matter except for how they tie into that developing relationship.

  So while the idea behind this book is interesting, and different for the Christian market, it’s just not drawing me in the way I want it to. I want more hero-heroine push-pull scenes and fewer “Oh, no, what will I do now?” plot devices.

Do you ever go through periods when you just don’t feel like reading? What does it take to get you back to the point at which you pick up a book and read again?

The stand-alone book is becoming more and more unusual. Readers, and therefore publishers, clamor for series—whether it’s a continuing story series (like my Ransome Trilogy) or a series of books interrelated by theme (Debra White Smith’s contemporary re-tellings of Jane Austen’s novels), setting (Susan May Warren’s Deep Haven series), characters (Dee Henderson’s O’Malley series or my contemporary trilogies), an event (my Great Exhibition series), etc.

Most of us who are avid readers either know when we pick up a book that it’s part of a series, or we’re savvy enough to realize when a certain secondary character is given just a little too much attention that they’re being groomed for a sequel/follow-up book. And, frankly, most of us enjoy that. I love it, both as a reader and as a writer. It’s one of the reasons we get drawn into TV series—we become attached to that setting, those characters, that setup. We like consistency. We’re most comfortable with what we know, and in a series, we get the comfort that comes from knowing.

Another reason we like book series is because an author can use each book in a series to drive it toward a big finale. The ultimate mystery that runs through the series. The final battle. The ultimate happy ending. And it’s the anticipation of that kind of ending that keeps us reading a series.

But what happens when the last book in a series is a big letdown?

Five years ago, I was caught up in Harry Potter mania. I’d pre-ordered my book from B&N and went down and spent the evening at the store so that I could get in line at midnight and get my copy of the book the moment it released (well, about forty-five minutes after the moment it released). I rushed home and stayed up most of the night reading. But I’ll admit—I was nervous. I was afraid of being disappointed in the way that Rowling decided to bring the story and the running conflicts in the series to a satisfying conclusion. But I needn’t have worried. I loved it.

Then, in 2009, before the last season of LOST started, I had that same nervousness. And as the season progressed, my nervousness increased. Not only were they not resolving the previous five seasons’ worth of unresolved conflicts, they introduced a bunch of new ones. When the series finale first aired, I had a huge emotional reaction—but I walked away disappointed because they didn’t end it the way I expected/wanted—with every conflict resolved and every question answered. (I’ve later come to appreciate the closure the finale brings to the character arcs, but it still annoys me that they didn’t bother to actually give the answers to most of the questions they’d strung us along with for several years.)

Now, this year, I’ve read two series—totally different in theme/tone from each other—that left me dissatisfied. No, not just dissatisfied; they left me wanting to hurl the third book across the room. (But I didn’t, since I read one on my Kindle and the other was an audiobook and I was listening to it on my iPad.)

Before the first movie released, I wanted to read The Hunger Games. So I “borrowed” it from Amazon (I’m a Prime member). I devoured it in less than two days. It’s one of the three highest-rated books I’ve read so far this year at 4.5 stars (you can see my star-rating matrix here). A month later, when I was eligible to borrow another Amazon book, I downloaded Catching Fire. While I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first book (review here), I read this one in less than twelve hours and was still excited to see where the series was going. So the next month rolled around and I borrowed the final book in the series, Mockingjay. Unlike the first two books, which I couldn’t put down, I had to make myself pick this one up to read. I was so disappointed with the change in tone and characterization of the first-person narrator, Katniss, that I actually found myself wishing she’d die and that the POV would switch to Peeta or Gale or even Haymitch. I am looking forward to the film adaptation, though, for the very reason that it can’t do what the book did—camp out inside Katniss’s head and give us nothing but page after page of meandering and repetitious angst.

In July, I started reading another trilogy—this time a general-market romance trilogy. The covers are gorgeous, and I’d read stellar reviews of the first book. I downloaded the audiobooks and got started with the first one—and loved it. (Review here.) So much so that I immediately downloaded and started listening to the second book. It was even better! (Review here.) I found myself looking for excuses to listen to it—even just for a few minutes while warming up dinner in the microwave or instead of actually visually reading something else at bedtime. Then the second book ended on a cliffhanger. And wouldn’t you know, I didn’t have any credits at Audible. As a member, I get a discount on the retail price, but I’m accustomed to using the one credit I get each month to “pay” for my audiobooks. But it ended on a cliffhanger. I needed to know what happened next. So, I made the decision not to wait three weeks until I got my next credit and go ahead and buy the audiobook (since it’s relatively new and not yet available in my public library system). And then it happened again . . . I found myself not enjoying the book I’d so highly anticipated. This one for a different reason (review here).

Is the disappointment in a book greater when it’s the last book in a series that we’ve loved up to that point?
In some situations, I think it is. Had I read the third book of the romance series first, I might have enjoyed it more. (Though one of the problems I had with the book was the fact I didn’t like the hero at all.) Had I picked up Mockingjay as a standalone book and tried to read it, I wouldn’t have forced myself to finish it. It represents everything I don’t like about (a) first-person narrative and (b) teen dystopian fiction.

We obviously have higher expectations for a book when it’s part of a series we already love. We become proprietary. We imagine things working out a certain way. We want to savor the same emotions we’ve felt reading the other books in the series. And when a final book in a series doesn’t live up to our expectations, there’s more of a sense of letdown than when it’s a single-title story that we don’t like quite as much as we expected to.

Does being disappointed with the last book in a series taint how you feel about the whole series afterward?
We all know how important first impressions are—but what is it that folks walk away with? What if you have a fabulous meal somewhere, but then the dessert comes. It looks a mess and the pastry chef accidentally substituted salt for sugar and the cream used was starting to sour. No matter how much water you drink, you can’t quite get rid of that salty, sour taste. What will you remember most about that dining experience? Would you go back to that restaurant? Recommend it to friends?

But what if it’s a restaurant you’ve eaten at multiple times—and you have favorite dishes you order each time—but this dessert was new, so you excitedly decided to try it. Will you go back to that restaurant? Recommend it to friends?

It’s the same for me with series. When every book is out and I read them all straight through and I’m disappointed with the last book, I’m more likely to never pick up any books in the series again to re-read. And I’ll probably be wary of that author in the future. When it’s a series I start reading when it first comes out—or when just a few of the books are out—and I have the opportunity to re-read them (sometimes many times) before the last book releases, I’m much more likely to remember the books in the series that I love rather than focusing on my not-so-great reaction to the last one. It’s easier to write that last one off as a fluke.

What about you? How do you feel when the last book in a series is a disappointment?