Rut

So lately, it seems that I've hit a serious book rut.

And by "rut," I don't mean that the books I'm reading are bad. Or that I haven't been reading much (we all know that's not the case). What I mean is that all of the books I've been reading have had endings that didn't necessarily thrill me.

I like the kind of ending that makes me cry, or jump up and down, or sigh and smile contentedly. I don't like an ending that's just like, narrator-figures-it-all-out-but-nothing-is-really-fixed. Nothing you want fixed, anyway.

First, there was A Long, Long Sleep, which I reviewed on this blog, and it's safe to say that I wasn't too excited about the ending. I mean, long-lost love interest is new love interest's grandfather. Not much can be done there.

And then I read 13 Little Blue Envelopes, and I really loved Keith. Like, I really really thought he was awesome. You could certainly tell he came from Maureen Johnson's head, because he is hilarious and spontaneous and says what's on his mind even if it's totally rude and/or unexpected. I thought he was perfect for Ginny, who's always thinking about whether she's doing something wrong. She thinks through everything she does, and yet trouble follows her around. I loved that he called her Mad One, when obviously he was the Mad One in that relationship. But then at the end, they only decided they were "kind of something." More on this later.

After that I read The Story of Us, which had an ending that was kind of beautiful but it also was NOT satisfying. It had the same feeling as the end of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series when Lena and Kostos are all "someday." Someday IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The end of The Story of Us left me wanting both a sequel and the same book from Janssen's perspective. I wanted to know what was going on in his head, because the only things we know about him are the things Cricket tells us. He's not even in the book. His dialogue is in italics instead of quotes, because at the one scene where he's actually there with her, Cricket is reflecting on what happened rather than relaying the actual scene to us. It's not FAIR.

While I was reading The Story of Us, I also started reading the Hourglass sequel, Timepiece, because I got it on NetGalley. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm already a little bit disappointed because of the change in narrator. We've already established that I don't like change, and I can hardly say I like Kaleb as a narrator. He's so angry and chauvinistic and... sterotypically male. Granted Emerson was angry too when she narrated the first book, but with her it was kind of endearing, because she was constantly doubting her own mental stability. With Kaleb so far it's only distanced me from him as a character, which makes it hard to get through the rest of the book. I've been reading it since Thursday [I think] and I'm still not even to page 150 yet.

Finally, I also read The Last Little Blue Envelope on Sunday/Monday and... [spoilers ahead]

OIF;OASIDHF;ASDHFKL. Maureen, there's a lot I don't understand about the way your mind works, but usually I like it. This, I did not like. Keith suddenly turned into kind of a jerk in this book-- I mean, he was still the same Keith, with his outbursts and craziness and calling Ginny "Mad One," but he seemed to lack any regard for anyone else's feelings, especially Ginny's. He knows how she feels about him, but he doesn't tell her he has a girlfriend. Then he volunteers to go on this adventure with Ginny, but doesn't think twice about letting his girlfriend come with them. He flirts with Ginny the whole time and leads her on, but his girlfriend is a perfectly good person and he's not going to break up with her either. I was pretty disappointed in his character and probably would've rather left it at the first book. In addition to all this, Ginny kind of ends up with Oliver, who I never really liked either. Their connection didn't seem real to me-- they were hardly even friends first, had no romantic tension, no romance either, and Oliver as a character was... bland. Throughout the whole book he was smoking, flaunting his superior intellect, fighting with Keith, or making Keith look like a jerk. Bleh. I prefer the Oliver in The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight.

And now I'm reading Insurgent, and Tris and Four are all distant from each other, and I don't like it. I get the sense that they're going to break up, or something is going to happen that makes one of them doubt the other, and then the third book is going to have to bring them back together somehow. But that won't come out for another year! MEHHHH

So now I feel like I need recommendations for a book that's going to leave me satisfied. Maybe I'll read Lola and the Boy Next Door again.

Anyone who reads this: if you have suggestions for books with the kind of ending I prefer, tell me in the comments. I BEG OF YOU.