So close, and yet so far.

Sometimes I'll like a book right up until it ends--or, in the maddening case of Infinite Jest, it doesn't end--and then, like a bad breakup that sours the whole remembered relationship, the story lets me down, coloring all the pages of enjoyment before it. So it was with page 280 of Ali Shaw's The Girl with Glass Feet; as soon as the title character *HERE BE SPOILERS* succumbs to her not-at-all-metaphorical ailment, I came to the horrifying realization that she's not the heroine at all. She has little backstory of her own and a convenient terminal disease, so once she's taught the neurotic young man who's the true protagonist how to live and love again, she slips away quietly.

Yes. She's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl with glass feet.