I found immense joy in the way Nour would gush with excitement over her mother’s Sfiha. I found immense joy when the stars above our hero’s journey in modern day Syria would reflect back the journey of another young girl, Rawiya, 800 years ago, as she sought her fortune as a mapmaker’s apprentice. But I found immense joy when Nour found color in every sound, every smell. The Map of Salt and Stars was at times excruciatingly painful to read. īut we have also lost the chance to experience the joy in those same pages. Īnd sure, we might feel better after that. We close the cover, we hide it on our shelf so we don’t have to face it again, we sell it to a used bookstore, we lock it from our minds. So when a book is really sad, many of us run away. Many readers turn to books to escape those things in reality. Things like grief, anguish, terror, loss, hopelessness. Some stories scare us because they make us feel things. But there is one fear many of us share that I’d like to discuss today: the fear of sadness. Some of us fear the genres we don’t like, streams of consciousness, words we don’t know, and unreliable narrators. Some of us fear multiple story lines if a book has too much going on, we know we’ll get lost. Some of us fear length if a book is too long, we know we won’t finish it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |