Goodbye Sookie Stackhouse, I Will Miss You.

It is a bittersweet place where I find myself right now, the minute after I finished  reading  Dead Ever After, the final book in the Sookie Stackhouse series. On the one hand, I am very happy with it ending the way it did, the way I knew it would, the way I knew it had to since I read the very first book. On the other hand, Sookie and crew have been my friends for nearly a decade. I have waited with baited breathe every spring for the next book in the series to arrive on my doorstep so I could catch up and visit with old friends. But all good things must come to an end. This is especially true for book series.

It has been proving a few too many times that a good book series turns bad when the author and publishing house tries to drag the cash cow out one time too many. Thank you Ms. Harris for being the true professional you are and knowing when to call time. Thank you for sharing your characters and their stories with us. Thank you for providing me with years of entertainment and fantasy. I know some readers are not happy with you right now, and that is unfortunate but I am definitely not one of them.  I have enjoyed your humor and style these past ten years and I hope there is good fortune enough in this world to allow me to enjoy your wonderful writing again. And thank you, especially, for bringing this series back to the place I thought it was going in the very beginning.

Some of you may notice I am not really reviewing the book. It feels too personal to me right now to provide a critical analysis (even the shallow type of review I usually do seems too intimate to share right now, after all I just said goodbye to some friends). I am experiencing that emotional cliff that follows on the heels of completing a book that draws you so completely into its world. The Sookie Stackhouse books may not be classic literature material but they will always have a place in my personal library. Over the years these books crafted by Ms. Harris have have made me laugh. They have been the reason I have stayed up late into the night trying to read one more chapter (which ends up always to be twenty or thirty more). They have even made me shout out in frustration a time or two and tear up for a brief moment here or there but they always left me with a warm and fuzzy place that I could revisit time and time again. A place that feels like I imagine Bon Temps feels like to Sookie; a place like home. 

I hope in time I will be able to reread these books and recapture the enthrallment of life in Bon Temps.  I guess there is but one more thing to say tonight: Goodbye Sookie Stackhouse, I will miss you dearly.