Which pony books make you cry?
I can cry at pretty much anything (I was never good, but became far, far worse once I had the children.) My family are now very used to my welling up at emotional moments in films, and they all turn round expectantly at particularly mushy moments, whilst I gulp and try (and usually fail) to give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Again. When I read Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, I so sympathised with Linda, who is endlessly made to cry by being taunted about the match by her tougher siblings:
- 'A little, houseless match, it has no roof, no thatch,
It lies alone, it makes no moan, that little, houseless match.'
My absolute prime weepy moment isn't actually a pony book at all: it's E Nesbitt's The Railway Children. Even typing it is enough. It's the "Daddy, my Daddy," bit at the end.
But pony books do their bit too to add to the dampness. I have great difficulty reading Black Beauty when he meets Ginger again, and then the cart with Ginger's body in it goes past: "The head hung out of the cart tail..." - I shall spare you the rest of the quotation.
John Steinbeck's The Red Pony I am completely incapable of reading in a single sitting.
Pamela MacGregor Morris's Lucky Purchase has me in floods, as does Veronica Westlake's Ten Pound Pony: "They stood and stared at each other for a long time. We stared too, and I think our mouths must have been open. It seemed as if something had broken somewhere and time was standing still..."
Comments
I don't weep, but I do get a bit choked up at the end of that story, and also at the end of 'The Railway Children'. 'Lucky Purchse' didn't affect me as much, although I did like it.
Now I'm trying the remember the book which featured a character, possibly a younger sibling, who liked to have the sad bits from 'Black Beauty' read to them, and would cry happily about Ginger's fate.
The second and third books in The Eventer's Triology - Genesis doing the cross country, and in the final book at the very end...
M&M - I cried too at International Velvet, and had forgotten about Genesis. That's another one. Have just finished Harry Potter 7 and cried at that too.