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.