11 YA Books With Happy Endings
I’m not really a fan of everything-will-turn-out-well-in-the-end books, either as a reader or author. In fact, a reader once asked me in exasperation, “Have you EVER written a happy ending?”
But once in a while…well, life is unpredictable.
Molly Horan at Mashable has put together a list of books that have their own forms of darkness, but the final chapters should leave you smiling. For example:
Written in verse, this book starts out as a cute love story with a less than reliable narrator. Colette, the daughter of a movie star, is more than unreliable — she’s a semi-professional liar. The conclusion might not satisfy die-hard romantics, but there isn’t a more stereotypically happy ending than the one in this book. You can practically hear the cheerful conclusion soundtrack as you finish.
Happy endings
~~~~~
One-minute video might save your life
Danger
~~~~~~
The tragedy of the dolphin who fell in love
Margaret Howe lived with a dolphin for ten weeks in the 60s, teaching it to speak English, Harry Mount reports at the Daily Mail.
Peter, a bottlenose, learned a few words of English. Initially, he listened attentively as Margaret went through lessons devoted to counting and shapes. But, like a lot of unruly six-year-olds, he preferred to talk rather than listen.
“He seems to have lost his sense of conversation,” Howe wrote at the time: ‘He often overrides me. I cannot teach him if he is going to yell every time…”
When Margaret answered the telephone, Peter would get annoyed, making loud and competitive noises as she talked into the receiver.
Then tragedy struck
~~~~~
The life and death of a nonpareil. Jay Lake truly was one of a kind.
The novelist who blogged his own death
Illustration by Mari Kurisato
Brutal honesty and an indifference to propriety and personal boundaries was inherent in Jay Lake’s blogging since 2008 when he discovered he had cancer and began writing about it.
Things looked hopeful in the beginning, but that soon changed, Simon Owens tells tells us at Dailydot.com. As anyone who regularly read his blog soon discovered, the cancer’s persistence proved invincible to both surgery and chemo. Early last year, his doctors told Lake that the cancer was terminal.
The then-48-year-old writer began to prepare himself—and his readers—for death.
The life and death of a nonpareil
~~~~~
19 Rare Recordings of Famous Authors
At Mental Floss, Joy Lanzendorfer has assembled some fascinating recordings, ranging from JRR Tolkien reading Elvish to an inebriated Hemingway shout about pigeons. And then there’s Raymond Chandler, Sylvia Plath, and even Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
This is the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. On April 29, 1937, she read an essay on words for a BBC radio series called “Words Fail Me.” It was published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays in 1942. A sample: “Of course, you can catch [words] and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.”
Rare Recordings
~~~~~
Quote of the Day
~~~~~
Alma Alexander
Check out my books
Email me
Comments welcome. What do you think?
Recent Comments