(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?
