Authors Answer #18: Have you ever wanted to rewrite the ending of another author’s published book? How would you change it?
Wow, long time since I did one of these! The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant There are very few books that get me so mad that I want to throw them across the room, but this is one of them. The author wrote a perfect historical romance, well-written, well-researched, the era brilliantly conveyed and the characters fascinating. She then destroyed it utterly by bookending it with a prologue and last chapter which turned it into something else altogether. I suppose the intention was to elevate the book from the realms of mere romance to historical fiction or even literature, and I daresay for many, possibly most, readers that worked fine. My book group, for instance, for whom this was a monthly pick, liked it well enough and most saw nothing wrong with the ending. But for me, it ruined the whole story. It took a main character who had, […]