Last year for my fiftieth birthday, Taryn and Shasta gave me a "Game of Thrones" party.  There were just a dizzying amount of gifts -- embroidered sigil patches, kraken pins, dragons, eggs, a beautiful wolf cup -- and of course, the five extant books of The Game of Thrones. 

The TV show had already become a social event for Chris and me; and on our 10th anniversary trip last year, he and I went on The Game of Thrones tour to Northern Ireland, visiting Tollymore Forest and other film sites, where we had a delirious, glorious time ooo'ing at trees where characters had met their demises in a number of ways, and petting the adult wolf dogs that had played the direwolf puppies in the first season.

Interesting fact: one of the dogs had double dewclaws.  Oh, and they were AWESOME ANIMALS.

I had not read the books.  I had two fears.  First fear: they would be awful.  Second fear: they would be great and I would then be compelled to spend half a year reading through all of them.  But neither fears came to fruition.

Martin cites many influences on his series, but I think Dune also had to have been a huge influence as well, since this is a story of grand politics told at a very personal level, which lends both aspects gravitas.  I was surprised at how solid the writing was despite its bulk, and also how respectful and understanding of the source material the TV show is: in fact, I am not sure I could have read through this book without having seen the show first, because this is not a comfortable genre (high fantasy with quests and politics) for me. But I am not reading the rest of the books (right now): I know the stories already, and as Taryn has noted, they are terribly sad -- tragic -- stories.  It's much easier to watch them with a friend (thank you, Chris), then to be with them alone, curled in your chair.  

Taryn won't watch more of the series and does not want to read the books.  I still want to make her a mashup of all the cool dragon scenes.  Not the miserable ones.  The cool ones.

One of the passages I liked, from Arya's dancing master, Syrio:

"Just so. Opening your eyes is all that is needing. The heart lies and the heart plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in that way knowing the truth."

Lessons for Writers: Perhaps a writer needs to remember that although she is creating a world in which her reader lives that -- even though characters must not be coddled -- perhaps some care of the reader needs to be taken.  Perhaps.  

Before we go further, this very salient article on fantasy from Ed Power, originally published December 22, 2013, in The Boston Globe.

WITH THE “THE HOBBIT: The Desolation of Smaug” sitting atop the box-office list—as now seems automatic for each of Peter Jackson’s vivid renderings of Middle-earth—we’re treated to a new round of public accolades for author J.R.R. Tolkien. With each movie’s release, we’ve been reminded of the Oxford professor’s rarefied position in the genre: his epic imagination, unique storytelling abilities, and foundational role in fantasy’s history.

Modern fantasy is a vast and commercially successful realm. HBO’s gritty, bawdy “Game of Thrones” is one of the most successful shows on cable, wooing critics and audiences with smart dialogue and sophisticated plotting. Schoolboy wizard Harry Potter anchored a colossally successful book and film series, spawning college quidditch teams and making its author, for a time, wealthier than Queen Elizabeth. Online, an estimated 8 million subscribers play “World of Warcraft,” a multiplayer game that unfolds in a shared universe of sword-wielding heroes and horrific monsters. A movie adaptation is in the works.

Clearly fantasy has evolved in a way that makes it a touchstone in the culture. But how much of its success do we really owe to Tolkien’s influence? Questioning Tolkien’s status as the father of fantasy fiction might seem as presumptuous as marching into the villainous realm of Mordor through the front gate. But the closer you look at contemporary fantasy, the less Tolkien you see. Harry Potter owes more to Peter Pan than to Bilbo Baggins. The moral and political complexity of “Game of Thrones”—both the TV series and the George R.R. Martin books on which they are based—didn’t exist in Tolkien’s universe. (Those astonished by the lusty mix of betrayal, nudity, and casual violence in “Game of Thrones” are perhaps unaware these have been standard devices in fantasy for decades.) Indeed, Martin, along with the majority of notable fantasy writers of the past 30 years, sidesteps Tolkien almost entirely.

Tolkien may overshadow other fantasy writers in name recognition, and his high-handed purity and saintly protagonists may define fantasy in the popular imagination. But the real strengths of modern fantasy, what makes the genre increasingly popular, are qualities that come from other sources entirely. Most important is a parallel, overwhelmingly American, tradition of fantasy that has its roots in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s—and whose surprising influence and foresightedness suggests that sophistication doesn’t always come from the libraries of Oxford.

IN THE BROADEST sense, the roots of fantasy extend to the very foundations of world literature. What are “The Odyssey” and “Beowulf” but “Lord of the Rings”-style epics? Fantasy in the narrower modern sense, however—a distinct category of derring-do with a stereotypically medieval setting, where magic and nonhuman races mingle—began in the Victorian era. That period gave rise to fantastical storytellers such “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” author Lewis Carroll and William Morris, the noted British textile designer and socialist campaigner. Morris’s 1894 epic “The Wood Beyond The World”—a ripping quest novel in which the protagonist journeys to an unfamiliar world, makes the acquaintances of a comely heroine, and is menaced by ogre-like “mini giants”—can be seen as a direct precursor of modern fantastical writing.

That writing began to blossom as a genre with the rise of the pulps, the cheap and lurid fiction magazines of the first half of the 20th century. Chief among them was Weird Tales, which began publication in 1923. Established by J. C. Henneberger, a Chicago journalist, Weird Tales published gothic horror stories and lusty adventure yarns, the latter typically set in reimagined versions of Middle Ages Europe or Asia.
It was in the feverishly penned pages of Weird Tales, and rivals such as Unknown and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, that several of fantasy’s most authoritative voices gained prominence. One was Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian; another was Fritz Leiber, one of the acknowledged inventors of “low fantasy,” which emphasizes gritty realism and is skeptical as to the possibility of Arthurian chivalry in a pre-modern world. Weird Tales also published H.P. Lovecraft, the Providence-born horror pioneer whose dystopian dread informs much modern imaginative fiction.

The pulp writers were contemporaries of Tolkien, but operated in a far darker milieu. Howard’s Conan stories are rip-roaring and full-blooded, a tapestry of amoral protagonists, exposed flesh, and gory action. Leiber showed fantasy could be urban—and urbane. His wry Lankhmar series is set in a vast fetid city of the same name; his recurring “heroes,” Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are, respectively, a thuggish hired sword and a wiry thief. Through their eyes, Leiber investigates the murky side of human nature, the characters indulging in such unTolkien-esque pursuits as boozing, wenching, and dueling. A cesspool of inequity, populated with feuding guilds, conspiratorial cults, and cutthroats lying in wait, Lankhmar feels vividly alive in a way Middle-earth arguably never does: You can almost smell the exotic spices, the open gutters, the freshly spilled blood.
 
Tolkien, meanwhile, was giving the world a different sort of fantastical writing. Middle-earth represented a lifetime’s work for the Englishman, who started sketching its fabulous races, swooping topography, and imagined languages as early as 1917, on sick leave from the army. His first novel, “The Hobbit,” was published in 1937. Typical of Tolkien, it contains plenty of peril and lots of backstory, but it is ultimately simplistic in its moral outlook. A heroic quest is undertaken by a doughty band, an evil dragon is defeated, and important lessons are learned. Granted, one of the heroes is killed at the end—but it is a noble passing, a respectable warrior’s death. “The Lord of the Rings,” the more ambitious and grandiose trilogy that followed, synthesized Anglo-Germanic heroic literature with a similarly black-and-white worldview, one colored by the conflicts of the 20th century. There is good and evil in Tolkien and very little between. The moral ambivalence of those American fantasy magazines—and of the world we actually inhabit—is largely absent.
Tolkien’s work did one undeniably important thing: It reached people who had never even heard of Leiber, Howard, or Weird Tales. The book particularly caught on in colleges, colonizing a highbrow new audience for what had been a fairly marginal and pulpy genre. As “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” achieved a critical mass of fandom through the late 1960s and early 1970s, fantasy and Tolkien started to become synonymous in the wider culture.

AT THE PEAK of Tolkien’s ascendancy, a new force arrived that would drive the development of fantasy: hobby gaming. First published in 1974 by two war-gaming fans with a taste for epic adventure, the complex pen-and-paper “role-playing” game Dungeons and Dragons quickly began to redefine the genre. D&D put fantasy’s tropes in the hands of a new audience who might have been disinclined to sit through hundreds of pages of Tolkien’s plodding prose, and provided a way to mix and match them. In a way, it open-sourced the genre.
 
D&D did borrow characters straight from Tolkien—its imagined realms teemed with dragons and orcs, halflings and dwarves. D&D’s designers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, were clearly well-versed in Middle-earth, and it is often assumed the game represented an early kind of Tolkien fan fiction. But its roots were far more diverse. D&D’s intricate magic system is thought to have been based on American fantasy writer Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” cycle; the gaudy, grubby warrior medievalism of the game owes more to the lurid imaginings of Robert E. Howard than to Tolkien’s donnish pastoralism. The game’s chief motive is usually a treasure-driven quest of shifting alliances or a straightforward monster-slaying spree—a far cry from Tolkien’s noble band united to save the world from creeping evil.

Forty years on, that more worldly and cynical sensibility exerts far more influence on fantasy—and on the wider culture—than does Tolkien. “World of Warcraft” and other popular online gaming franchises, as well as the popular collectible card game Magic The Gathering, flow from the distinctive sensibility established by Dungeons and Dragons. Many of the authors responsible for some of the most influential works of the post-Tolkien era are gamers themselves. George R.R. Martin has role-played, as has Terry Pratchett, creator of the greatly loved “Discworld” books. Dungeons and Dragons was likewise an inspiration for Steven Erikson, whose sprawling “Malazan Book of The Fallen” saga is, in terms of universe building and narrative ambition, perhaps the most significant fantasy sequence of the past decade.

By contrast, the most Tolkien-esque strains of fantasy have largely tumbled by the wayside. Terry Brooks’s “The Sword of Shannara,” a surprise blockbuster that reached The New York Times Best Seller list in 1977, was so indebted in tone and structure to Tolkien that today it reads like the literary equivalent of a covers record. That isn’t to suggest that people have stopped writing, or reading, fantasy that follows Tolkien’s old-fashioned sense of moral certainty. But these books have dwindled steadily in number and cultural heft, so that today “classic”—i.e Tolkienesque—fantasy exists as merely a subcategory of a wider genre.
Why has fantasy fiction prove so enduringly popular? Clearly part of the appeal lies in the way it speaks to our imagination. More than that, however, it lets writers work through complicated moral questions at a distance from the real world. It explores very human themes—loyalty, ambition, how to govern a society—in a setting imaginary enough to avoid coming across as partisan or preachy.

The works that do this best—most recently “Game of Thrones,” “The Malazan Book of the Fallen,” Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” novels—draw their mood and internal architecture from books with a very different worldview and moral code than “The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien will always have his place in the canon; after all, it’s fun to lose yourself in “The Hobbit” for three hours in a theater. But as people read the books and watch the bloated movie adaptations, it does no service to the genre to suggest that his work is the model for all that followed. It makes it all too easy for those new to these fantastical worlds to assume Tolkien’s prudishness, his sometimes archaic prose, and his Boy Scout characters are failings not of one man stooped over a desk in postwar Britain, but of all fantasy—for all time.

"Women are horrible.  I mean, quite as horrible as men.  Is there anyone in the wide world that has aught but ice water in his or her veins?"

Fritz Leiber is a favorite author.  I was really impressed by his science fiction story The Wanderer; Conjure Wife is already a favorite fantasy book of ours.  There is no doubt that he had seminal influence on many authors -- Roger Zelazny, and R.R. Martin has no doubt borrowed a lot of gravitas from this series of stories  written over half a century. This story I had read before, in eighth grade --  originally entitled Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser  -- but I only remembered one scene: where Fafhrd's betrothed Ice Woman is furious at him for being attracted to the visiting showgirl, Vlana.

In Conjure Wife, all women are secret witches who control their husbands' lives.  In this book, the northern Ice Women are a domineering and sorcerous matriarchy, and in the more "civilized lands," women are utterly excluded from power and position.  These stories were written in the forties, so I found myself searching for some indication that Leiber was making a statement about unfairness, cruelty, and the play of power between the sexes, rather than displaying overt sexism.  There is evidence that this is indeed thoughtful commentary, overlaid as it is with a lively its "swords and sorcery" adventure.

I enjoyed this book, though I was not enthralled enough to continue reading more stories in the series-- just yet.  What makes this a very nice read is , at 150 pages, it is not longer than it needed to be (I am wearying of overblown thousand page stories), the images and concepts often invoked a "I can't believe you went there," reaction, and amazing use of adjectives made the story pop ("Pawky" comes readily to mind.).

I have more appreciation for this story, too, because Chris and I visited Borderlands in San Francisco yesterday, which is a bookstore for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery.  I went through a half dozen books looking for a good read... and I can't believe how much poor, blocky, obvious-hit-the-numbers writing is out there.  Are editors even aware of how powerfully books can evoke a reader these days?  How books should be?

As an example, this paragraph:

"Mouse," the mage had said, firelight dancing on his short white beard, "when you stare your eyes like that and flare your nostrils, you are too much like a cat for me to credit you will ever be a sheepdog of the truth. You are a middling dutiful scholar, but secretly you favor swords over wands. You are more tempted by the hot lips of black magic than the chaste slim fingers of white, no matter to how pretty a misling the latter belong -- no, do not deny it!  You are more drawn to the beguiling sinuosities of the left-hand path than the straight steep road of the right.  I fear me you will never be mouse in the end but mouser.  And never white but gray -- oh well, that's better than black.  Now, wash up these bowls and go breathe an hour on the newborn ague-plant for 'tis a chill night, and remember to talk kindly to the thorn bush."

For writers, these lessons: even a muscular adventure story can have the sinews of thematic relevance, and should.  And even a high fantasy story can have magical, take-your-breath away writing, and should.

And for more thoughts on Fritz Leiber's symbolism...

I went to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop with Robert Levy back in 2006.  He was one of my favorite people there -- there was something so peaceful, accepting, understanding, and intelligent about both this calm young man and his writing, and I felt rather graced by his presence.  His novel The Glittering World came out in 2015, and it is so much the same way.

The story is about four friends/lovers who travel from New York to Cape Breton in Canada to sell a house. With them, they bring all their deepest emotions  -- from profound devotion to deepest regret to the unrequited longing that haunts most human lives -- and these are sculpted into life by the otherworldly creatures that inhabit the wilderness surrounding them.

There are four sections to the book, each from a point of view from the four characters.  I found it a relief that this wasn't a particularly strongly driven plot -- some story lines end up ambiguously unresolved, like our real lives.  Too, like our real lives, the horror of this tale derive from the character's own foibles and histories.  I liked very much that each section of the book brought each character more and more to life, making both them and the story more interesting -- so that by the time I got to the end, it felt not only riveting, but true.

Well done, my friend.  Well done.

Lessons for writers: (Well, the obvious one is that I need to work harder on my own writing.  Could I have gotten a novel out in ten years if I had put more effort into it?  Yes.  Let's make the next ten years work better, shall we?  Okay: enough with envy.)  But the important lessons for writers here is that our shadows really are our stories.  Thank you again, Robert.

This is a wonderful book, so you might read it and visit Robert Levy here. 

Neon Lotus is exactly the kind of book that can only be found by going through a wonderful used book shop or a well-stocked library, and I don't think I would have ever cruised over it on the internet.  The author wrote six books in the 80's and 90's, published a short story last year, and is listed on Wikipedia as also being a video game designer.  

This book was probably classified under science fiction, but I will consider it fantasy because it involves manifestations of Tibetan deities and deals with reincarnation, even though it takes place 200 years in the future.  (Also, I needed more authors starting with the letter "L.")  A woman born in New York is the reincarnation of a Tibetan scientist, so she goes to Tibet with the goal of freeing them from the still-ruling Chinese.

I have a fondness for this book because the sections and descriptions with those deities and the machines built to display their manifestiations are so incredibly imaginative -- it brings something to your head that you have never seen before, and that is cool.  It was also thoughtful and understanding of the source material, Tibetan Buddhist mythology, which for me was a spiritual compelling to be compassionate despite our human foibles. There were some irritants -- I never really felt an affinity for the main character, Marianne, ever, the storyline was a little too easy and deuses ex machina, and a sharper, more incisive writing would have been nicer.

But I am willing to cringe a little through those things if there is a payoff, and for this book, it was in these intensely imaginative and touching images:

Chenrezi  stood above her, strange expressions crossing his eleven faces, while his thousand arms and five thousand fingers flowed like the graceful tendrils of a sea anemone.  The fingers brushed each other, touching tip to tip, parting again. Countless intricate patterns formed as the hands and fingers wove in and around one another; connections were made and broken by the instant.  His fingers shaped the most elaborate mudras she has ever seen.

Lessons for Writers: Give your readers that which they have never seen or thought of before.  



But this author is a writer in the best of ways, because he has always been writing and in love with books.  His website is Not So Few Monstrosities.

I've reached this point quite a few times in these reading lists -- floundering to find books for authors whose names begin with the letter...  Now, I am on "L."  I've read Lovecraft and Le Guin, but horror author Bentley Little's Night School, while an homage to Lovecraft's Miskatonic University, is a little too sleezy for my taste; and the book I already had in my library, Snake Oil by Bruno Lombardi, is science fiction, not fantasy.  I'm reading through Marc Laidlaw's Neon Lotus right now... and wondering what my next two "L" books will be. Surely, Robert Levy's new book.  Perhaps this Ken Lieu, recommended by IO9.  Perhaps a L'Engle book I haven't read, if she has something that veers closer to fantasy.

This is part of the path through this forest that a reading list makes for you -- peeking down the side trails that you decide not to take.  It's a fascinating and pleasing process, even though it is tinged at times with frustration and a little niggling sense of lost-ness.

"Where is Selidor?"
"Very far out in the Western Reach, where dragons are  as common as mice."
"Best stay in the East then, our dragons are as small as mice."

How lovely it is to read a book that I can finish in a day.  And how lovely it is to be on Book 50 of my "100 Great Fantasy Novels."  This has been such an adventure, though I would prefer it were the next fifty books nor take four years to read.  My priorities are wrong, somewhere.

Written in 1968, when there was no real YA, many women had to write under male pseudonyms to get published, and all characters were chiseled Nordic types, this story about magic, wizards, dragons, and facing our fate is beloved by so many.  There is much to love, but I feel the message of the story is somehow greater than the story itself: not a bad thing, perhaps, and the story truly shines best when that message is coming forth.

Manhood is patience.  Mastery is nine times patience.

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow that act.

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant.

Lessons for Writers: I write in this style, somewhat.  I must have read books by LeGuin or books influenced by her -- I certainly am influenced by the writers of the 60's and 70's.  I can see what is lovely and annoying in her writing, and perhaps in my own.  Lovely: evocative images, like wizards forgetting who they are and remaining as dolphins in the sea.  Annoying: back-loading of images to make readers have to double-back on the sentence.  It's good in small doses, but not all the time.

                          Visit Ursula Le Guin's website; she writes beautifully on navigating Story.

I have heard the echoes of these stories all my life, from Straub and King to the X-files and beyond.  It would be far, far easier to list what has not been influenced by these dank and dense writings.  You have been touched by these stories yourself if you have ever screamed at a hapless hero “Don’t go that way!”
 
I read a 1982 Del Rey collection of sixteen stories, including the now-ubiquitous-in-geeky-circles “The Call of Cthulhu,” but the ones that stood out for me were “The Colour of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”  All of these stories, however, had amazing opening paragraphs that drew me in quickly.  Also, all of these stories are written in infamously convoluted sentences that I really fought to comprehend – and oddly, when I was finally able to hold them in my head, found myself caged completely by the imagery.  It took more effort, patience, and concentration then I will usually put into reading, but the resulting effect was deviously poetic, and quite unique.   
 
Of course, the monsters and suspensefulness of Howard Phillips are renowned, but they are couched remarkably in lush, though dyspeptic settings.  Here are just two of the so many:
 
Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically.  Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries – the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass.  Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region.  I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives.  Sodoma and Leonardo conceived of such expanses, but only through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades.
 
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.  There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without having ever caught the glint of sunlight.  On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled side bulging beneath low gambrel roofs.
 
Lessons for writing: As I was reading each story, I thought: “What a fantastically amazing movie this would make!”  But it also brought home to me the magic, ingenuity, and technology of really fine writing when it is done right: it makes a movie in your head, it's portable, and it's created on a much smaller budget!
 
Oh, H.P Lovecraft's life and personality were suitably bleak and miserable enough to provide the yeast that made his stories rise, but why don't you visit his alma matter, Miskatonic University?

This book was immediately fascinating because many of the main characters are gay men.  I haven't read much of -- oh, wait, come to think of it, none -- of that perspective in any of the fantasy books I've read.  In science fiction, my only recollection of specifically gay male characters are of the vile Duke from Dune and Madrid's transgendered lover in When Gravity Falls.  It's like there is a conspiracy in genre literature to erase variations in sexuality...

I will have to think on this more.

The Fall of The Kings has interesting characters, evocative writing, a lush and gritty setting, and a see-the-plot-several-miles from-the-horizon: it's the last part, the plodding and constant prophetic hints of where the plot is going, the wait-for-it!-wait-for-it! that convinced me to stop reading the book half way through.  (That alone always gives me that annoyed "Here, hold the biscuit on your nose until I say it's okay" feeling that must make the most domesticated of dogs crave to rend human flesh.)

As that annoyance grew, it gave time for other concerns for the story to rise: idiosyncrasies.  For instance, if this is a fantasy world of its own, where are they getting chocolate from?  They have public libraries where you can check out books?  Gah.  I may still finish this book though, when I'm in the mood for it.

Still, a very interesting lessons for writers are here: Not saying something says a great deal, sometimes in very powerful ways. 

It took me three years to read "100 Great Science Fiction Books."  I think it is going to take 6 or 7 years at the least to do the Fantasy version of this list because (1) I work more, (2) fantasy books are noticeably longer than science fiction books, especially early thin science fiction books, and (3) I keep making a detour here and there for a series.

I just read four books in a row by this one author: Newton's Cannon, A Calculus of Angels, Empire of Unreason, and The Shadows of God.  I had to.

I got lured into this steampunkish, alchemical early 18th century tale featuring Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Louis the 14th, and many of their historical friends and enemies -- and as you can guess from the front end of this sentence -- the first two books were riveting and amazing and demanded I read more -- and the final two were not nearly so enthralling for me.

There was so much that was wonderful about these stories: plot-twisty and fascinating, fantastical logic and inventions, with beautiful writing besides, and I think that is part of what drives my disappointment, because I really hungered for more of that in the last books.  But in the last two books, there were many, many battles, and I'm not a reader of war stories. (How many times can someone's head pop, anyway?)

So, I don't know for sure that there was anything wrong with the writing or the plot twists toward the end, or if the premise and style had started to wear thin on me after four books, but I can say very clever and interesting characters ended up (a) saving the world, (b) in a gigantic battle of immense proportions, and (c) everyone rushed into an ending where they lived pretty happily ever after in yet another stock-fantasy ending regardless of their personalities, with (d) no real deepening or growth of their characters, except marginally, for my favorite, Adrienne.  Adrienne was consistently great.

Again, important writing lessons.  There is a price for all action, one paid before, and one paid after. You might, might be aware of the first price, or at some point become aware of what you have paid for the privilege of making your own mistakes.  But there is no way you can prepare yourself for the second, the price you pay for what you have done.  I think this is what most endings -- including my own -- are missing.

That second price... that second price...

                And Mr. Keyes has written other books, which are probably equally clever...