Category:Authors, Blog

In Praise of Tearful Books

By: EloisaJames
June 17, 2010

I adore tearjerkers.  How many of us haven’t found ourselves sitting in bed, sobbing so hard that your eyes feel weird and your chest is literally heaving, Kleenex strewn all over the bed and the floor? (If you haven’t, stop reading now.)

Recently I came across one of my most-beloved childhood books, Mrs. Mike, by Nancy and Benedict Freeman.  It’s a saga about a sixteen-year-old Irish girl and a rugged Canadian Mountie, in which the path of true love is anything but smooth.  I loved it when I was sixteen, and oh, I love it now. Sgt. Mike is everything one could hope for in a husband: steady, deeply loving, romantic and funny. And when the worst that can happen happens, he’s there for Katherine Mary.

Another book I’ve adored as an adult is Susan Elizabeth Philips’s This Heart of Mine.  I’ve read this book about a million times, so it’s ridiculous that I still tear up reading it.  But I do. Molly and Kevin have to battle their way to happiness, and because life really isn’t perfect, they face true sadness.  Reading about their happy ending is five times more enjoyable than turning the last page when a couple had uneventful lives.

These books are both romances, which doesn’t mean that their authors present a saccharine sweet world, in which life is always rosy.  Quite the opposite.  But after you’re done reading—after you find yourself strewn with Kleenex, and your husband asking an idiotic question like “Is it that time of month?”—after you close these books, I dare you not to feel that life is joyful.  That with love, patience, and forgiveness happiness will come around again, no matter how painful the blows you suffer.
So what’s one of your favorite tearjerkers? Movies count too! How about The Other Side of the Mountain? Anyone remember that?

OTHER DISCUSSIONS HAPPENING IN AUTHORS Romance


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