Top 5 Favorite Series Endings

So it’s still Wednesday, and this is my top 5 Wednesday list for this week. This week’s topic is Favourite series endings. These are mine. Top 5 Wednesday is a meme created by Ginger reads Lainey.

Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor. This is the third book in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy. I thought it was just very beautiful, because that’s what Laini Taylor does. She writes beautifully, lyrically, wonderfully amazing books. I thought it was a perfect, and very fulfilling ending. I thought it… left the right amount of things unanswered, which is a weird thing to say, but I liked it. Not every thread was picked up and answered, which was fine. And I thought Karou and Akiva’s ending was just wonderful, and I love them.

A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. This is the 14th and final book in the Wheel of Time series. I think part of why I love it is sentimentality, I’d been reading it since I was… 16, and it finished when I was 25, so I’ve spent 9 years reading the series. It’s a big, beautiful, bombastic and astounding conclusion. And it was just great. There’s a chapter of 150-odd pages that is just about the Last Battle. Which was exhausting, and just awful to read through, because apparently Jordan just decided to kill everyone. It made me sad that Jordan is dead, because he has the main plot take place in one continent, and there is a continent to the east, called Shara, and he barely mentions it, and they make an appearance in this book, and I want to read everything about them. So that’s sad, but this was awesome.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. Without the epilogue, because that was stupid. So I read Harry Potter when it first came out, and waited excitedly every time a new one was being released. And I loved this, it’s so great, and dark, and there’s so much frustration, and I was annoyed. I think there’s a lot of sentimentality to my love for this as well. You know, it’s Harry Potter! I love it just for that. And I pretend it ended after the last chapter. Like in How I Met Your Mother, I pretend it ends when they’re flirting on the train station, but I’ll not go down that rabbit hole again, because I wrote a whole goddamn post about that show. Anyway, Deathly Hallows, whoo.

Kushiel’s Avatar by Jacqueline Carey. So I don’t know if this is cheating, or not, I think it’s okay. Carey writes trilogies set in the same universe. So while the second and third trilogy probably don’t make sense without reading the first one (two), you can just read the first trilogy, and end it there. Anyway. It’s about a woman named Phedre, who is basically a geisha who saves the world. And the third book is set in a parallel Eastern Europe and is about a chase to free a young boy, and it’s so dark, and it’s exhausting, and it’s beautiful. Carey is a beautiful writer. She writes magnificent prose, and I love her. Phedre is tough, complex, and beautiful, and strong, and she is willing to go to the end of the world to help a child who needs her.

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness. It’s so good. I feel like the trilogy started out very innocently. Which I’ll qualify, because it’s a horrible world with so much awfulness. But, in the first book Todd is very innocent and he sees the world very clearly in black and white, and there’s right and wrong and there’s good and evil. And throughout the trilogy he grows so much and sees that the world isn’t necessarily just one thing or another. And it sort of upsets his whole world, and he comes out of it so grown and changed. And also the Chaos walking trilogy has one of the creepiest villains of all time in Mayor Prentiss. It’s just so good.