Endings, Happy or Otherwise
Hello, Hungry Readers,
The links are Bookshop links.
I just finished Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, and I want to talk about a few things it does. I usually like to talk more about books you might not have stumbled over yet, rather than books that are part of a long running bestselling franchise that have already gotten a huge marketing push. (Though it turns out my very lovely co-worker had not heard of the Hunger Games. So, there you go. Huge marketing campaigns still miss people.) As the newsletter title suggests it made me think about endings. I went in cold, having not reread any of the Hunger Games books in a while, so just vague memories of characters. And so I know how the game this book talks about ends. Because that whole only one winner deal.
But reading this book was very stressful. (In fact, pro tip, maybe don’t read this book during your commute, in a very busy, high stress week at work. Be wiser than me!) Because knowing someone survives a book is really the bare minimum. There are so many good or bad or funny or disgusting things that can happen along the way.
I remember once someone saying why is the main character always the person who has to go do the thing. And well, in the case of something like a hunger game, it is because if your POV character dies in the first chapter, your book is very short. Unless they just haunt the rest of the game or something.
In romance we are moving are characters towards a solid relationship that will seeming last beyond the end of the book. But of course, so many things can happen along the way to that point. And learning how they figure out how to do that is what hopefully we find interesting. And less stressful than a hunger game. Though sometimes it’s not.
On a more romancey note, I also read Sangu Mandanna’s A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping and it is just a book about people trying to figure out how to be kinds to each other. Okay, also, occasionally sexy to each other. And technically, Sunrise on the Reaping is also about a character trying very hard to care for as many people as possible, with varying results. But back to A Witch’s Guide, I loved the first book, but oh, I really adore this one. It was just cozy while also being realistic about the world we live in, and the parts we can easily change and the parts we cannot.
Anyway, happy reading!