Novels ought to end well. That’s not to say they need to end happily or earth-shatteringly. Nor do we need the Dickensian ending where the final pages dispatch with each of the zillion characters we’ve met in the previous hundreds of pages, mostly through astounding coincidence. But we like to feel that the ending suits the rest of the book and that we can respect the author for crafting a story where everything adds up. Not that there can’t be surprise—but it has to be the oh-how-clever-I-should-have-seen-it-coming kind, not the “Huh???” kind of surprise.

When I finished Anne Rivers Siddons’ latest book, Off Season, had it not been a library book, I would have thrown it across the room. Having read other of Siddons’ novels, I thought I knew what to expect in this one: a strong sense of place, the point of view of an older woman reflecting on how life got her to where she is, and a fascination with the wealthy, established families of a region and at the same time a gentle satire of their snobbery and exclusiveness.

All of these come into play in Off Season. The protagonist, Lilly, comes to the big summer house on the coast of Maine to scatter the ashes of her late husband. Much of the novel relates Lilly’s memories of her childhood: her relationships with friends and parents, and the events that shaped her 11-year-old psyche. That part’s great.

In a raging storm that knocks out electricity and leaves our heroine cold and disoriented, Lilly has to come to terms with secrets she has recently learned. She stumbles to the door and there stands someone whose existence calls into doubt the sanctity of Lilly’s marriage. Reeling from this encounter, she finds herself in the arms of someone from her past. It’s hard to know which parts Siddons wants us to believe are real and which are in Lilly’s mind. The event that seems more real creates a plot twist that the reader isn’t prepared for and that Lilly doesn’t deserve. The part that’s probably all in her head is sentimental and makes a mockery of Lilly’s courageous battle to overcome her tragic past.

Still fuming, I turned to Sue Miller, whose earlier books (my favorite being While You Were Gone) I really liked, though I had been disappointed lately. One can count on her for strong, realistic characters, interesting relationships, and often a shifting point of view. All these are in The Senator’s Wife.

Alternating between the voices of two women, one an aging wife of a U.S. senator, the other a 37-year-old, newly married and newly pregnant, the book explores their marriages and their own senses of identity. In the novel’s present, they live next to each other in an old brownstone. Delia is struggling with her feelings about her politician husband’s infidelities and how to stay married to him but also have her own life. Meri, scarred by her mother’s coldness, worries about her own maternal instincts and the diminished feelings of sensuality that her pregnancy brings. As she takes care of her neighbor’s house, Meri learns of the history of Delia’s marriage.

I hated the ending. I found it hard to believe that the characters, especially Meri, would act as they do. I thought the ending was a bit smutty and I was angry at Miller for making me wonder if I’m a prude, or out of it, or what.

But worse than the ending was the epilogue, 13 or so years later. Meri reads the obituary of Delia and reflects on the last time they saw each other. Let’s just say I wanted to slap her. This would be okay, even a mark of a good writer, except that I don’t think Sue Miller wanted me to consider assault.

In Ann Patchett’s Run I had an altogether different response to the ending. As she does in Bel Canto, Patchett puts disparate characters together in a tight space—and in this case a tight time frame as well—and lets them make discoveries about each other and themselves. The pace is slow but intense, as each of them adjusts his or her own dreams because of the impact of a new relationship. You can see how the novel has to end—and it does end that way. So there should be a feeling of satisfaction; everything adds up. Instead, I felt the ending was a bit ho-hum. The one surprise didn’t really make that much difference. I was beginning to feel very hard to please.

From this tight, realistic novel to Brunonia Barry’s sprawling, over-the-top work, The Lace Reader, was quite a leap. The book is very visual. I could see the sailboat going out to the island, the rocks, the ramp, the two houses, one on either end of the island. The mansion in town with its widow’s walk, wine cellar, and boathouse became equally vivid.

The protagonist returns to her missing great aunt’s mansion after having been gone since the age of 17. Coming back after 15 years, she is overwhelmed by memories of her twin sister and that sister’s death, her teenage love, her disastrous relationship with her mother, and the abusive uncle, who actually shows up, now the leader of a religious cult. She is too embroiled in the confusions of the past to be able to carry on a relationship with the handsome policeman in charge of finding her great aunt. The ending is a huge surprise. My initial response was a “huh?” but then I conceded that the author did prepare us for it by having the protagonist admit in the opening sentence that she lies and also by letting us know the mental breakdown she had suffered. The ending is as over-the-top as the rest of the novel.

Finally, the perfect ending. In The Tenderness of Wolves first-time author Stef Penney sets a brutal murder in a small settlement in the Northern Territory in the winter of 1867. Several different characters (a 17-year-old boy, a mother, a trading company official, a Native American trapper) go off through the cold wilderness in search of the murderer and of the answers to their own questions. In the end, the murder is solved. But more importantly, each of the characters has worked out an “ending” for him or herself, not all at once but in the course of the long treks across the tundra.

The problem with talking about endings is that you can’t give them away, and it’s hard to talk about them without saying what they are. There’s also the dilemma of how to end a piece of writing in which you have criticized endings.