Richelle Mead’s Bloodlines novel The Ruby Circle is almost a perfect finale, but for one thing at the end… Spoiler warning!

Everything about the Ruby Circle was going really well. Every character from the previous books, every storyline and subplot, all returned to tie together into a breakneck finale. There was action, there was romance, there was intrigue and magic… all the things that are fun in the Bloodlines books were present in the finale.

Until, that is, the last four pages of the last chapter. Those four pages, and the epilogue, single-handedly undermined the book, the characters, and everything that was awesome about the entire Bloddlines series. Never, in all my reading, have so few pages utterly ruined so much goodness.

At the end of the book, new baby-daddy Neil decides to be a deadbeat dad, and leaves his and Olive’s baby Declan in the care of Sydney and Adrian for Reasons. The in-series logic for Sydney and Adrian being foster parents makes zero sense. Apparently, they have to do it to hide Declan’s identity. But the only people who knew Olive was pregnant are Sydney, Adrian, Rose, Dimitri, Neil, Lissa, and the ladies of the commune who can be trusted to keep a secret. The only people who knew Neil was the father are Sydney, Adrian, Rose, Dimitri, and Neil. Ergo, Declan’s identity is an extremely well-kept secret.

So, if a random dhampir baby comes out of a commune, how on earth is anyone supposed to jump to the conclusion he is a physical impossibility? If Olive was pregnant around a community of blood whores, who is to say the father is Neil? There is literally no way of ever coming to the conclusion Declan is the son of Neil and Olive. Yet this is viewed as perfectly reasonable cause to straddle Sydney and Adrian with a baby.

But even if the in-series logic added up, why in the name of all that is good and feminist would Mead straddle Sydney and Adrian with Declan? Why, in a series that passes the Bechdel test on every page, would the protagonist have to end up married with kids by age nineteen? Up until the last few chapters, there was no inclination ever that Sydney or Adrian wanted kids. The idea was never even floated, unlike Lissa and Christian planning baby names.

In fact, there were several books devoted to how Sydney wanted to travel, see the world, be fiercely independent… I’d be hard-pressed to find characters less likely to want a baby. And yet, according to the epilogue, Sydney and Adrian have settled down to domestic bliss and are perfectly content.

This is so incredibly problematic from a feminist standpoint. While there is nothing wrong with settling down and having babies, the idea that all female characters have to get their happy ending that way is not okay. Sydney was one of the best female characters to ever grace the page — fierce, caring, flawed, strong, sexual, insecure, proactive — she is basically all anyone could want in a well-rounded female character. She is incredibly intelligent, ambitious, and driven. I expected great things from her, an expectation not dampened by her shotgun wedding in Silver Shadows. But her maternal override in the eleventh hour does not make sense for her character. To reduce her to happily ever after with a husband and baby is a huge disservice.

Editor’s note: You can purchase The Ruby Circle over on Amazon.