(Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish. Want to make your own list? Clicking the image will take you to this week’s post. Happy listing!)
I try to avoid sad books, but sometimes they sneak by — and they’re almost always worth the heartbreak they cause. Here’s ten books that broke my heart (a little or a lot).
1. Love You Forever (Robert N. Munsch, illus. Sheila McGraw) – A “children’s book” that follows a little boy’s growing from needing to be taken care of to caretaking. Bring tissues.
2. Hurt Go Happy (Ginny Rorby) – So hard to read. But so important.
3. The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (Ellen Feldman) – The rumor that Peter van Pels, one of the people who shared the attic with Anne, escaped the Holocaust alive. It’s not true, but what if it were? What if Peter had lived, and gone on to have a family? And how would he feel when The Diary of Anne Frank was published?
4. The Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein) – Again, bring tissues. I hope I could be as selfless.
5. Beloved (Toni Morrison) – I read this in high school, and nearly threw up several times. It was so horrible and scary, but ultimately hopeful.
6. Deerskin (Robin McKinley) – What happens to Deerskin is horrible. Reading about her dealing with it broke my heart.
7. Peter Pan (James M. Barrie) – Extremely bittersweet, this growing up thing.
8. Lucy (Laurence Gonzales) – The ethics and morality of human experimentation and the first human-ape hybrid.
9. The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove (Susan Gregg Gilmore) – A story about a teenage white girl who falls in love with an African-American teen boy. In the 1960s. In Nashville.
10. March (Geraldine Brooks) – The story of Mr. March, the father in Alcott’s Little Women. Grotesque and beautifully written.
What books broke your heart? Is it any of these? Can we hug it out?
Great picks. I hadn’t heard of The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, but it sounds like a seriously heartbreaking read.
I picked it up in a bookstore in Prague several years ago. It was, indeed, seriously heartbreaking. But it was a beautiful book.
I was just looking at Hurt Go Happy in my library the other day wondering if it is a good book. Guess I just got my answer.
Anne, it was marvelous. Heartbreaking and marvelous. You should read it.
Oh, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank sounds absolutely heartbreaking. I’ve never heard of it. How terrible. I’ll have to see if my library has it.
I haven’t read much Robin McKinley but I’ve always loved what I have read. I’ll have to put this on my tbr too. Great list!
It came out several years ago, so you shouldn’t have a problem finding a copy. Feldman is an amazing writer.
I’ve only read McKinley’s Deerskin, and I loved it. Tough subject matter, but McKinley’s a fantastic storyteller. I’ve got a couple of her “Beauty and the Best” retellings on my TBR list.
great choices with The Giving Tree and Peter Pan!!! I also really enjoyed March although it took be 3/4th of the novel until i figured out is was about Little Women…
I didn’t read the actual Peter Pan until high school, and it was incredibly bittersweet. I can’t even imagine reading it now, when I’m actually a full-fledged grown-up. I don’t think I could handle it.
That’s fantastic about March! It’s not super obvious, so I understand the mix-up. The tone is just so different that it’s hard to make that connection. And the character isn’t anything like he is in Alcott’s novel.