This week's winner for our Comment of the Week is...
Cue the chocking cat!
Start shooting sugar stars out of the punch bowl!
The happy ending goes to...J LARKIN!
Her funny descriptions made me choke on my coffee a couple times (thank goodness it wasn't a fish from a brothel. lol), and most of us agree that we like a bit of happy and sad in our endings because, well, that's usually how life works, so we can relate.
Congrats, J! Please email us and let us know which book you've chosen from our Vault. And no need to apologize for rambling. We loved it! Best wishes on your project!
I prefer ambiguously bittersweet endings (which I acknowledge to be perhaps the most ambiguous answer I could come up with). But now I have the opportunity to ramble!*
Because I have seen and experienced a bit of real life, I know that true, blue, sugar-stars-shooting-through-the-wedding-punch-bowl happy endings are just unrealistic. Yes, there are happy people in the world. Yes, terrible trials can be conquered. But a common aspect of the happiest endings is an almost magical coming together of solutions in the last fifty pages or so. That, for me, is a major disconnect from the characters whom the gods apparently smile on.
But because I have seen and experienced a bit of real life, I know that true, blue, 'I just broke my wrist, tripping over my cat that just beat cancer, who has choked to death whilst eating the fish that I saved from a brothel' endings are also just plain unrealistic. Yes, there are miserable people in the world. Yes, terrible things happen to good people. But part of stumbling through life is finding ways through these terrible things, and even if an individual's personal story ends on a bitter note, there were most likely immensely sweet moments in their past that made their lives, at the very least, worth it. Stories that suggest otherwise leave me disconnected from these characters that the gods use as personal chamber pots.
So, there needs to be a bit of both. Real, genuine loss, and true, happy-sigh-inducing victory. But part of the fun in reading a novel is being left to guess at the vague things; the freedom to choose your own ending, in a way. Therein lies the beauty of the bittersweet ending: you, the reader, gets to decide exactly how 'bitter' and how 'sweet' it really is. Until the sequel comes out ;)
*apologies for the long post. I've been ruminating on this quite a bit lately, flipping the coin on which ending to give my own project.
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