Belated Post for 9.18.24: Books That Should Have Ended a Different Way

This week's Long & Short Reviews question was a challenge. Books that should have ended differently? But they were the authors' books to end as they chose, weren't they?

Well...maybe, now that you mention it...in some books the "fantastic ending" to a realistic story is at least conventional, but in others...

1. My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara: Flicka still comes close to dying and Ken still risks his life to save her, but in a believable way. Maybe she gets stuck in a place where she can't get food and starves out the infection, and Ken helps her climb out. 

2. The Birds' Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin, and many other Victorian books where the very good child dies: The good child recovers, or at least gets a nice long remission. 

3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Cathy died even younger, before she could marry the rich man while continuing to "love" Heathcliff. He remembers her as a childhood friend, a fond bittersweet memory, and is able to love a grown-up woman who has the fortitude to marry him. Well, that's not just the ending but fairly well rewrites the whole book. But it needed extensive rewriting.

4. All of those novels by Barbara Michaels where the "surprise" ending is that the sweet attentive man is the heroine's enemy and the one who acts like a jerk is her friend, so she marries the jerk: There must be a middle ground somewhere. Either the man who sincerely wishes the heroine well seems indifferent but not like a jerk, or she meets another man who is easier to like than both of the first two together, or she decides being single is better than being married to anybody she's met so far. While reading my way through her books in the 1990s I often wondered whether the writer known as Barbara Michaels knew any likable men.

5. All of those novels by various male authors where we're supposed to sympathize with the cheating husband: Nobody has any sympathy for a cheating husband. All of those cheating husbands die before they can infect their wives with disgusting diseases.

6. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: Wossname, the blonde who manages to be too thin and too rich, has wanted Roark like a cat on the back fence all along, and is able to admit it to herself without the then-polite pretense that their flop into bed is rape, only she didn't mind. But the fate of the Fountainhead Building doesn't change.

7. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: Dagny dumps Hank Reardon and runs out into the snowy night to throw herself at John Galt. Galt turns away, saying "You've ruined those wretched Reardons' lives; you might at least stay with Hank now!" and marries a woman who knows less about S&M and more about True Love. Dagny realizes what her True Love has always been at last, and throws herself under one of her own trains, warbling "Make me one with your wheels!" It does.