I agree with not wanting brick wall happy endings. I now prefer endings where the future is hinted at rather than spelt out, although perhaps as a child I preferred endings a bit tidier. It certainly niggled at me not knowing what would happen to Esther; on the one hand, Nicola is sensible and would probably have casually resumed friendship without a fuss, but on the other hand, suppose Esther carried on avoiding her out of an assumption that Nicola wouldn't want to be friends and ended up miserably distant from her. I really don't like the way things are going with Nicola and Patrick at the end of RAH either! I wasn't saying that I would prefer not to have Attic Term, although I could probably do without RAH. But I was more curious about the published continuation novel than I would have been if it wasn't for the loose ends. And it fascinates me just how many different takes on the characters' futures can be found in fanfic. The characters have gone on living for me in a way that other characters from favourite books haven't quite. Perhaps the amount we 'need to know what happens next' depends on how much we identify with the characters ourselves, so what we really want to know is whether things will turn out alright in our own lives. The teenage me really strongly identified with Esther. I don't know if anyone has read 'The Fault In Our Stars'? The heroine in that is obsessed with a book about a girl suffering (like her) from terminal cancer which suddenly stops without a proper ending, as if the character had died. But it turns out that she is obsessed with what happens next, not so much about the girl because she accepts that she would have died, but with the girl's parents. She is worried that her own parents might break up after she dies. After a conversation with them in which she finds out that her mother is training to be a counsellor and they reassure her that they are not going to break up, she is much happier about the unfinished book.
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I really don't like the way things are going with Nicola and Patrick at the end of RAH either!
I wasn't saying that I would prefer not to have Attic Term, although I could probably do without RAH. But I was more curious about the published continuation novel than I would have been if it wasn't for the loose ends. And it fascinates me just how many different takes on the characters' futures can be found in fanfic. The characters have gone on living for me in a way that other characters from favourite books haven't quite.
Perhaps the amount we 'need to know what happens next' depends on how much we identify with the characters ourselves, so what we really want to know is whether things will turn out alright in our own lives. The teenage me really strongly identified with Esther.
I don't know if anyone has read 'The Fault In Our Stars'? The heroine in that is obsessed with a book about a girl suffering (like her) from terminal cancer which suddenly stops without a proper ending, as if the character had died. But it turns out that she is obsessed with what happens next, not so much about the girl because she accepts that she would have died, but with the girl's parents. She is worried that her own parents might break up after she dies. After a conversation with them in which she finds out that her mother is training to be a counsellor and they reassure her that they are not going to break up, she is much happier about the unfinished book.