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Sometimes, when a character in a book is killed off, I have to put the book down & leave it for a while. Last year, I was reading Pachinko for my book club, & after someone died, I had to put it down for a week, it might have been for longer, except I wanted to have finished it by the meeting. Now, I am reading a suspense murder mystery & one of the kids dies, in a drowning accident, & again, I have to stop reading that book, & will move onto something else for now. Does this happen to anyone else?
Yes. In Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, the death of
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Bosch's wife, Eleanor Wish, blew me away. I did not see it coming, and she was such an integral character.
I had to close the book and couldn't return to it until the next day.
Yes—that was a surprise
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But I felt like Connelly didn’t want to include her going forward—he didn’t want the distraction or interaction story lines might require if she was around...Maddy being a young girl wouldn’t be that much of an intrusion...
There are some novels I read and do have a very emotional reaction to what happens with some characters—even if I have read the book before...
I certainly remember crying when Beth dies in “Little Women†and Ol’ Yeller was shot...
I probably over-react at times and yes—I do have to pause sometimes and sometimes I get angry at the writer’s choice to do that....
A death in a novel sometimes disturbs me. I can't remember anything at all of a novel I once read in high school except for the death of an innocent woman that happened right at the end of the book. The cruelty of that death has stuck with me all these years.
I hate stories where killing people becomes a way for the writer to solve all plot problems or an ending to the book. I especially hate them when the death is as pointless as the characters who are killed off.
Anne Tyler’s A Spool of blue Thread has an unexpected death near the end. Tyler invested quite a bit of the book in the character, so the death was a shock. But I think this was in service to her story.
I do not remember putting the book down for a bit, though.
I was literally just discussing this today with a colleague, when I said it was silly how upset I got over the death of a video game character... but he said it's no different from book or movie/TV characters, and how invested we get in their lives. It's weird, isn't it?
Sometimes, when a character in a book is killed off, I have to put the book down & leave it for a while. Last year, I was reading Pachinko for my book club, & after someone died, I had to put it down for a week, it might have been for longer, except I wanted to have finished it by the meeting. Now, I am reading a suspense murder mystery & one of the kids dies, in a drowning accident, & again, I have to stop reading that book, & will move onto something else for now. Does this happen to anyone else?
I'm a fairly dispassionate consumer of fiction, but the more a character's death impacts me, the better. To evoke emotion, to make one feel, is the highest praise I can give to a storyteller.
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