I have not finished many series lately. The Walking Dead wrapped up a few months ago, and before that… I don’t know. It honestly might have been the Wheel of Time. Which is going back nearly 10 years I think? One conclusion to draw from this is that I have really way, way, way too many started but unfinished trilogies on my to-read shelf. Another is that there are definitely people who need to do more work on finishing their series, and here I am looking mainly at GRRM. But I think the first conclusion is definitely a relevant one, is all I’m saying, and maybe I’ll do something about that in the next months.

That turned out to be a bigger digression than I thought. Because, I finished Fool’s Fate yesterday, and, okay, that is not technically the end of a series. Maybe it was at the time, and then Hobb decided she could write more after all? I don’t know, but I know someone told me that it felt like the end of the series, and that this person was 100% right. If nothing else were written in this world, I would be… honestly, I’m so satisfied that to some degree I’m concerned about there being more written.

The first trilogy ended with the plot crisis averted, but the character crisis fully embraced, and that’s kind of how I’ve thought of Hobb’s writing as a result, despite evidence to the contrary since. The second trilogy ended with both plot and character crisis averted, but with the acceptance that the world was still turning.

[Because of the author, mild spoilers lurk below.]

Whereas, this trilogy ends… sublimely. Crises aren’t averted, they’re resolved. Sins are forgiven. The errors of the past are undone. Characters reach the real life equivalent of happily ever after, which is maybe not quite that, but it’s close enough. Nothing is ever perfect, but things can be sublime. I had strong emotional waves constantly from the last third of the book onward. Which is a long way around to saying what I could have begun and ended with, back in the first paragraph. I haven’t finished a lot of series lately, but this ending (which is not the ending, ha ha) may be the most emotionally satisfying that I’ve ever read.