Yesterday afternoon, as I was huffing and puffing on an elliptical machine at the gym, it dawned on me that I could tolerate no more of Medwed's The End of an Error. It's too bad that I had to read 210 pages before I figured this out, especially considering that I knew at 150 pages that this book was going nowhere for me. An avid reader and blogger (whom I've forgotten now) once said that one should not give up on a book or persist in reading one after 75 pages. My problem is that I'm always waiting and hoping that the book is going to get better, that the characters will finally develop some depth and that some action will cause the middle-of-the-book doldrums to vanish. When has this ever happened?

The plot of The End of an Error was so predictable; I was five steps ahead knowing what was going to happen as I turned the pages. The characters' relationships were stereotypical, the romance between Lee and her first love Simon was not believable. Medwed never convinced me to believe in the world she created. Worst of all, I knew the climax and resolution a hundred pages before the end of the book. Enough said. If I had known that this novel was a "romance," I never would have picked it up. It should have been published as a mass
market paperback.