All right. If you were an active fan of this series all along--like, keeping up with the author's website and writing in your suggestions for the series--you may have been less surprised by the last book than I was (maybe). But I was really disappointed by the way this series ended. (Don't worry; no spoilers except the general outline of the book.) 
 Each of the twenty-seven previous books, including prequels, covered a space of four months. First semester of the school year, second semester, summer. Every time. And I really liked this, because it allowed the detail and pacing that made you really feel like Alice was a person you knew, not just a character; it was like her life was happening in real time. 
 This book covered forty years. In the first place, the name was confusingly changed because the publisher thought it should be... Just, you know, because. It was over 500 pages long, too, so from the very beginning, the last book was different from every single other book in the series. Then, the pacing made no sense. Where each of the other books had handled one semester at a time, this one had Alice starting college and finishing the year just a few pages later--mid-chapter. Once college ended, time went even faster and more unevenly; three or four years would be skipped in one sentence, followed by several pages describing a conversation or a trip to the doctor's office. 
 A friend's review said that this felt like reading fanfiction, and now I know exactly what she meant. It wasn't like a real book in the series; it felt more like something an author would throw together ten years after the end of the series to appease fans who'd been begging to know how everything turned out. If I'd gone in with that expectation, I still would have thought the writing was crappy, but at least I wouldn't have been utterly baffled for the first several chapters. And I wish I had known, because my initial confusion really ruined my mood for the rest of the book. At this point, I'm simultaneously glad that the series is over and sad about being glad. I still think the Alice series is one of the best coming-of-age series a kid could read, but its lackluster ending leaves me resigned rather than satisfied.