This post is from Devora Gray. Devora writes erotic thrillers and spicy paranormal romance. When not reaching for the tissue box, she’s baking near a Las Vegas pool or hiking with her Wheaten terrier, Pumba.
Please note that this post contains mild spoilers for older books.
Some endings heal you. Some endings haunt you. And some just piss you off.
My heart feels waterlogged. A vat of upheaval—sticky and black as tar—sits heavy in my chest. If I could have a good cry in the shower, I’d be fine, but I’m not ready to let go. This isn’t just anger. It’s betrayal.
I’ve just finished reading Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, and here’s the spoiler:
one of the main characters dies at the end.
The novel wasn’t my pick; it was my book club’s. Every month we choose from a leading literary chart to study what makes a bestseller. So far, we’ve covered The God of the Woods, The Favorites, and Death of the Author. Each deserved its spot on the New York Times list—strong characters, fascinating premises, sharp twists. Each, in its own way, asked the question: what is true love?
Having cut my teeth on romance at twelve, I know no genre delivers emotional punches like those with romantic arcs.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy—with a romance.
Wuthering Heights is a gothic horror—with a romance.
The Fault in Our Stars is YA fiction—with a romance.
Wild Dark Shore is literary fiction—with a romance. A woman washes up on a remote island off the Australian coast, half-drowned. She should be dead. A family of four—father and three kids—rescue her, and suddenly the story brims with questions: Why is she here? What are they hiding? Should I even care how this ends?
I do, thanks to the combustible chemistry between the woman and the father. Add in multiple POVs and time jumps, which McConaghy threads together with arachnean grace, and you’ve got five voices exploring five versions of love. The potential payoff feels enormous.
But here’s the catch with romance outside the genre proper: there are no guarantees.
Traditional romance offers a bulletproof contract: the happily-ever-after.
It’s a promise: Hey, life is short and hard. You deserve to believe that true love exists—and you deserve to have it, if only in these pages. Who doesn’t want that?
Apparently, a decent chunk of readers.
In my book club, a handful of us shared outrage. The rest weren’t bothered by a knife-twist ending—they welcomed the sledgehammer to the chest. Which makes me wonder: is devastation sometimes the point? And if so, when does it feel cathartic, and when does it just infuriate?
To answer, I think back on my timeline of literary heartbreak. At thirteen, I read Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor, where a modern woman falls for a 16th-century knight. I adored Nicholas Stafford.
And then—the gut punch. The heroine returns to her own time. He stays in the past. No one dies, but the lovers are ripped apart. I never picked up Deveraux again, even though most of her books end with a proper HEA.
Other stories still hurt, but the pain felt earned.
The Princess Bride: the book skips the movie’s tidy conclusion, yet the love still glows.
The Time Traveler’s Wife: death was inevitable, but layered with tenderness.
The Notebook: two lovers holding on until the last breath—worth it.
These endings devastate, yes, but they honor the love they built.
Back to Wild Dark Shore. I can’t quite name what bugs me. My husband, trying to help, suggests I imagine my own ending. Sweet man—never once asking why I’m gutted by fiction, but re-writing an author’s story is out of the question. I hear myself defending McConaghy. She wrote the right ending for her story. The breadcrumbs were all there. Given the characters’ motivations, the ending made sense.
So maybe my frustration lies not with the death itself, but with what comes after.
In Romeo and Juliet, the families stop feuding.
In The Princess Bride, Buttercup and Westley escape, Humperdinck defeated—even if the future is uncertain. I don’t need a Disney ending. I just need balance restored.
In Wild Dark Shore, not so much.
The surviving characters—mostly children—are not going to be okay. Love’s memory won’t carry them through years of struggle. And that’s what breaks my heart. Don’t the characters deserve a reprieve? Don’t I?
Because I loved every sentence. I wanted to recommend the book to fellow prose-lovers. The deeper I sank into McConaghy’s world, the more intimate our bond felt. I trusted her to deliver me to some shore of peace, believing the final page would offer closure. Why? Because true love is supposed to conquer all.
Maybe to McConaghy, it did. But in my tantrum, I’m only thinking about myself and lived trauma. I have loved and lost, as have all of the people I call friends. We understand heartbreak as a drowning, the kind that strips us bare, makes us prod at our own innards in awe and horror: That’s a human? All that meaning inside this fragile sack of meat?
Such loss makes us compassionate to suffering, but it’s not an emotion we seek out willingly.
It’s also why, when the world gets too real, I read romance. Love—in all its forms—is the tie that binds. It delivers me into impossible scenarios and into the arms of solace. The beauty of HEA is the belief that true love not only exists, it lasts. I can close the book and return to carving out my own definitions, bolstered by the illusion that I might die hand-in-hand with our soulmate. That illusion matters. It’s a stranger giving shape to our rawest emotions.
But each of us has our own definition of what catharsis requires. That’s the thing about a book that breaks your heart: the reading is over, but the experience isn’t.
Sometimes I feel like Veruca Salt: “But Daddy! I want a happy ending NOW!” I replay scenes, argue with characters who will never answer. And I realize the real ache isn’t about the author or the novel. It’s about the promises I’ve whispered to my child and my hubby—I will love you until the end. At the best of times, this promise is easy to deliver. At the worst, it’s impossible to decipher.
I’m not done with McConaghy. Her prose is too good, her characters too alive. But it will be a long time before I can risk Wild Dark Shore again.
What’s the last book that broke your heart? And have you forgiven it?
A book club I once belonged to chose The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. The ending ruined my entire weekend, and that’s when I decided it’s HEA or nothing for me and books. And no, I haven’t forgiven that book, I am still mad about that ending.
Thanks for the excellent column. Wild Dark Shore also broke my heart, but I felt a little more optimistic about the future, at least for the kids, than you did. If there are specifics in the final chapter that led you to the opposite conclusion, please don’t tell me! I’ve become pretty good at denial as a defense mechanism.
I picked up WDS because I had read Migrations, McConaghy’s previous novel, for a book club. I’ve learned to steel myself with book club selections because several of the members have no problem with “serious literary fiction,” which rarely has a HEA.
When this happened at the end of the first Game of Thrones book, I called it “genre treachery” and have banned Martin’s books from my house. 🙂
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But this reminds me of a quote by Lois McMaster Bujold, who says she’s not in control of half of her art form:
“The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader’s mind. It’s a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. The words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when someone reads it.”
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It’s something I think about when I put a book down as well.
Oh I know this one, I still haven’t forgotten or forgiven a book I read as a teenager at least forty years ago. It was exacerbated as from my reading of the book it was clearly headed towards a happy ending, the twist came in the last paragraph, with nothing more, and just NO!
Part of the reason in that book was the complete lack of any foreshadowing, but in general a lot of my frustration with unhappy endings, especially in literary fiction, is that I don’t think they are true to life. It’s not that we don’t have unhappy real life endings, but that we also have happy real life ones and I think a lot of writers are simply incapable of writing the happy into a good book. I’m not saying that our focus characters must not have any trials, but to use an extreme example they don’t have to live in a grim dark world either.
The Girl with the Pearl Earring – should have ended when she was standing and considering her options. The path she chose infuriated me.
It’s been decades since I read it, but doesn’t A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR have a time-travel/paranormal-appropriate promise of an HEA? That is:
When I read anything not marketed as a romance, I put on a different reading hat, if that makes sense. I’m not expecting an HEA, so I’m not let down by it’s absence. However, if I’m expecting an HEA/HFN, I will be devastated if that doesn’t happen. The book that absolutely gutted me (although its beautifully written and I reread it frequently) is Taylor Fitzpatrick’s THROWN OFF THE ICE. It’s definitely a love story, but most assuredly not a romance.
Sorry my spoiler box didn’t work.
I’m still mad about the ending of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh for the opposite reason. It had a happy ending that made me mad – which is unusual for me since I’m all about the happy ending – but the book was so grim and the happy ending felt so, so unearned.
I can think of four. One is a science-fiction novel that I read when I was a teenager, and when my favorite character died so that the protagonist could be spurred into action, I threw the book across the room and screamed (also, said character was Black and the protagonist was white, I can see the bad trope now). And three are by Jodi Picoult, and are the reason(s) I don’t read her anymore. I got very sick of last-minute, sometimes last page, plot twists.
I feel very guilty about it but honestly, I think life is too short for unhappy endings. I realize this means I’m missing out on some wonderful books. Maybe one day I’ll be strong enough and catch up on all the lovely unhappy endings I neglected.
I agree with @DiscoDollyDeb, that one needs a “different reading hat” to regulate your expectations of the different genres. The older I’ve gotten, the less likely I am to seek out books that I can’t trust to yield an HEA. In a lifetime of reading I’ve learned to shamelessly enjoy a happy ending if I’m reading strictly for pleasure, but I’ve also learned to cast my net wider when reading in a social setting such as a class or a book club. The resulting interactions can yield just as much pleasure as an HEA. There is a unique satisfaction in discussing or arguing about books with like minded souls that does not require lovers riding off into the sunset.
As for books that break your heart, the one that first comes to my mind and refuses to back down is Charlotte’s Web. I’ve loved that sucker since fourth grade, and I’ve read it multiple times. It makes me cry, but it’s perfect.
As for more adult offerings, I loved the Mallory series by Carol O’Connell, but I’ve long since given up hope that the protagonist and the man who loves her will reach any sort of HEA. If I’m honest, I can’t imagine an ending to their relationship arc that would be both happy and could maintain the integrity of the characters.
No worries – all fixed!
@Lara: I threw “Gone with the Wind” across the room and screamed when I read the ending at age 16. The worst part was my mother came running up the stairs to see what was the matter and it was after midnight (so I should have already been asleep) and the second worst was it was a borrowed book (this was pretty bad behavior from someone who doesn’t even crease the spines of paperback books when she reads them).
@DiscoDollyDeb: When I read “A Knight in Shining Armor,” I took the ending as a certainty rather than an implication (don’t disabuse me of my illusion, please).
This sort of twist is why I cannot stand Nicholas Sparks being referred to as a “romance writer.” I was okay with “The Notebook” because of the known medical diagnosis but after a couple more of his works, I realized he likes to kill off a main character at the end (sorry to be spoilery but he’s been published long enough I don’t think it’s a surprise anymore). That tears my heart out and since I read for pleasure, I want and need my HEA because it gives me hope (and these days, hope is in short supply in this world). Plus, I’ve invested so much time and emotion into the characters, I don’t want anything bad to happen to them. As with others, yes, I cried like a baby at the end of both “The Time-Traveler’s Wife” and “Lizzie and Dante” but it was kind of inevitable and not an actual twist, so I could bear it (but I still would have preferred they ended differently). I definitely won’t be reading this book.
@Sandy, I agree with you SO MUCH about The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. I kept waiting and reading and waiting for happiness to finally happen. Such a depressing story. I still shake my head wondering what so many other readers see in that book.
@PamG, I forgot, I completely forgot about Mallory. I don’t think I’m tough enough any more to read about her. When I read your comment it was like a stab in the heart and it’s been more than 15 years since I last read O’Connell.
@Annie, I have a friend who reminds me of books she has read that I would like, but I just can’t bring myself to read them, however excellent and lovely they are, because I know they don’t have happy endings.
@Lara – Jodi Picoult! The first book I read by her was My Sister’s Keeper. I felt so emotionally manipulated by the plot twist! ending that I never read another one. .
“Knight in Shining Honor” made me stop reading Devereaux, also, and I had read ALL the books about her blasted Montgomery family. I think that the ending for the medieval couple was just so sad and the characters didn’t treat each other well. The tacked on “happy” ending didn’t balance the angst.
“Cry No More” by Linda Howard is another book that broke me. I eventually read “The Woman Left Behind”, so I didn’t quit that author completely. That one was more fiction than romance and all the characters were believable. I guess it was too close to real life for me. Something in the author’s note or dedication also made me think some parts of the story came from a true experience.
I agree with this whole piece, but the part that especially hit home for me was the bit about not expecting a Disney ending, but wow, isn’t the world hard enough, can’t we at least end with some kind of uplift or faith in humanity restored with hope for the future? It’s easy to write depressing or horrific endings. IMO, it’s a mark of a truly talented writer who can pull off an uplifting ending where it feels aligned with the story and satisfying.
I have never forgiven Meredith Ann Pierce for the ending of the Darkangel trilogy. I was so upset that I actually did write my own ending and paperclip it into book 3, in case I ever read the books again. I never have, and I wonder if I would see things differently now.
The ending felt wrong to me; the reasons the [insert thing here since I don’t know how to do a spoiler] were flimsy and easily could have been different. I also felt like the ending might be based on some personal issue or grievance the author had, which did not apply to the characters in the story. Arg, still mad just thinking of it.