Lovely Little Shelf

After doing my flashback on Forever Angels last week, it got me thinking about how I really did have a thing for sad, twisty books when I was middle school aged.  I’m not really sure why.  I had a pretty normal family life, didn’t know a ton of people who had died, and was about as well adjusted as a middle schooler could be, but I really read a lot of sad, sad books.

The saddest of the sad were the Lurlene McDaniels books.  I’m not kidding when I say that in every single one, someone had a terminal disease and then they had this obstacle that  they needed to overcome.  They usually died in the end.  I remember one (the cover’s up top) called Till Death Do Us Part where the girl has a brain tumor and she falls for a guy with CF and they decide to get married before they die.  In another one, I’ll be Seeing You, a kid is blinded in a science class explosion and while in the hospital, a girl with a facial deformity falls in love with him. She’s scared because eventually he’ll be able to see again and then he’ll see the “real” her.  In one that I remember, a young girl is declared brain dead and her parents decide to turn off life support.  Her sister fights for her.

This is just a sampling.  They are all these horribly sad stories about kids dying and for whatever reason, I was super into them.  I guess even young kids have this curiosity about death, but I’m pretty sure that these books were written for kids that were, like, living in the hospital… or knew someone that was dying… I’m pretty sure they were written to help kids cope.  I wasn’t even coping. I was just morbid. That, and I’ve always loved a good book-related cry. Trust me when I say that books about kids dying are a good way to have one.

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