That climax, however, for me personally, reduced HFS from a superb book and instant favourite to a good book that I have ambivalent feelings about. Several of the main characters start a course of action that is not only ill-conceived and doomed from the start (as was the earlier course of action between Elspeth and Edie, truth be told; I could not truly understand either, but maybe that's just me), but also shockingly and unwarrantedly cruel. While Niffenegger does not shy away from the consequences of those actions and devotes ample attention to the complicated feelings they cause in both the perpetrators (in the broadest sense of the word) and the victims, I found it hard to care very much about the resolution after such a twist. I recall only one other example of having an ending ruining my pleasure in a book as drastically, which was Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest - even if I can't even recall just what that ending was. In that case, I ended up not reading the sequels nor any of Marillier's other books (though I may yet do so). I do think I'll continue to read Niffenegger's books, but it's a shame all the same.