Alas, Poor William de Braoise..

I am reading Celia Hayes' Aldsverein: The Harvest, the third of a trilogy about German immigrants in Texas in the mid-19th century. I can tell already that when I get around to the second book, the death of a central character is going to devastate me... I tear up just knowing about what happens to him.

It was that way with William de Braoise, Princess Joan's lover, in the second of the Heaven Tree Trilogy by Edith Pargenter. When what happens to him when he is caught at it by her husband had me sobbing. I grieved for a couple weeks. And I often say "Now I am going to have to kill myself" when I reach the end of a novel I have been thoroughly engrossed in. "How can I go on without these people?" I ask myself.

It strikes me that even if some of these dearly departed who are breaking my heart were not in fact fictional, if they were in fact historical figures, the fact is given my reading tastes -- i.e., anything that takes place after 1600 is science fiction -- these darlings would be dead now anyway. Long. long dead. Llewellyn, Joan, William, the whole lot, would all be pushing up a gazillionth generation of daisies now.

So clearly the author has been effective! When I sat chilled to the bone at the sacrifice of Conal in Edward Rutherfurd's Princes of Ireland or sobbing at the killing of Patrick Smith on Vinegar Hill in his Rebels of Ireland,it's his marvellous characters and stories that are doing it to me, not that I am, like, a sap, or anything, right?

Let's not even get into what Nicholas de Fleury did to me at the end of Book 6 of House of Niccolo! I used to love that man...

Sigh.