Well I like the ending because of the emotion it draws up in a reader, but I do agree that if felt like there should have been a few more pages, or a couple more books, and I can understand and again agree that most people read books to escape reality. The series was pretty out there at some points (I mean a bunch of birds of prey saving a guy from jumping out of a building?) so trying to have a "realistic" ending led to utter shell shock, K.A. should probably have been telling the ghost writers to get darker as the series continued to avoid that.
However there's a saying, nothing ventured nothing gained. I can understand not wanting a character to die, I didn't want Rachel or anyone else to die, however to me the fact that they could and did didn't just make the story more realistic it made it more memorable, it still stirs up emotion in most of the people here today, right?
But I do remember being pretty peeved with the advertisement at the end of the book, it kind of felt out of place, I mean it's one thing for a book to advertise for another book in the back few pages, it's another for a writer's final word on one series to be an advertisement for her next, or so I felt the first time I read it . . . I dont think I've read it a second so what I remember of it is probably worse than it really was.