Lovely latest novel in the Tales of the City series that I felt like I grew up with. This one told with the past and present of matriarch to the wacky renters of her Barbary Lane home. Was great to hear her back story and how the next generation is moving forward. So much more fluidity in genders then when these books first came out. I remember the sex change surprise seemed so shocking at the time and now the world is so different.

As much as I hated to see this series end, Maupin did a great job of bringing all of the moving pieces together - literally. Without spoiling the ending, it was like saying goodbye without really saying goodbye.

A most excellent read. Wonderful to reacquaint with friends! I don't want to say goodbye to any of them. Last book... sad... missing them all already.

Love this book. So well written. I love the way the characters are all so well rounded and that you don’t need to have read previous books to understand what’s going on

Loved every word and every surprise in this book!

Quick read. Brings Tales of the City up to present time, fills in the history. It was fun to reunite w/the characters - I read Maupin's previous books - but not knock your socks off fantastic or anything.

The final book in the Tales of the City series. This one focuses on Anna Madrigal and fills in a lot of the details on her childhood and the origins of her name. While I didn't find it as captivating as I did some of the earlier books, I enjoyed having the story wrapped up nicely.

IT is a quick read. I read it in an evening. It is not his best work, but it was wonderful to revisit and say goodbye to my old friends.

Loved this book! Very captivating.

Tales of the City may only have been part of my life for the last few years, and I may not even have been cognisant of its first conclusion, but it's been a part of me nonetheless. Given the amount of time that has passed, though, The Days of Anna Madrigal is probably the final novel that it has been threatened to be.

Part of this, of course, is that most of the cast are old enough to have attained near full lives anyway; another aspect is that Maupin is charmingly out of touch with his younger characters, peppering their sentences with "dudes" and "amazeballs". Shawna has written a novel composed entirely of text messages, ignoring that in the age of the iPhone, autocorrect means that people are back to writing in nearly normal prose. As was the problem in the previous two instalments, Maupin almost has contempt for the younger generation of characters for the simple crime of being young (and he seems not to realise that he's cannibalised Mary Ann's worst ever storyline for Shawna in this one).

The Andy Ramsey chapters are well-integrated and poignant, and anything that Anna does is good. Brian, who has been sidelined in the modern age, is little more than a tool to further her storyline and he probably deserves better (but at least he has found happiness). Jake and Michael's respective insecurities are somewhat grating, particularly as Michael has been with Ben for some eight years now, but it's probably better for Maupin to work these out on the page than on his real life relationship with Christopher Turner.

The Days of Anna Madrigal's biggest problem is its setting of Burning Man, which is an event that is endlessly fascinating to all who go to it and all who dream of it, but is mystifying (if not outright boring) to those who have no desire to attend. Maupin writes of Burning Man with all the zeal of a convert, despite that what he is describing is precisely what he skewered in Significant Others' "Wimminwood" - if not a thousandfold worse. The city in the final Tales of the City novel is borrowed from thousands of stoners and artists who should know better, and it doesn't belong to these characters, even if it is nice to see them all together again in one degree or another.

I reread the final chapters in writing this review, and they're the most on-point work in the entire book: a beautiful ending to the series, even if the rest of the novel that comes before it is a little light weight.