Parts of some novels make you cry. It could be tears of sorrow when a character (human or animal) dies or gets severely injured or there’s an unrequited-love situation, tears of happiness when there’s a long-delayed reunion or a character gets long-delayed justice or appreciation, etc.

If the author handles such scenes right, reader weeping is often a good thing. Our emotions have been engaged — to the max. One of the reasons why we love literature.

I thought about this last week while blubbering through the final chapters of Kristin Hannah’s superb 2018 novel The Great Alone, about a family that moves to a remote section of Alaska in the 1970s as the father tries to deal with trauma from being a prisoner of war in Vietnam — only to continue traumatizing his wife and teen daughter with physical and mental abuse. The whole book is emotionally intense…