I understand completely! And it’s fascinating to me how in one book the impact can be perfect, in another (such as Lily) somewhat off yet nonetheless effective enough to create the “bewildered love” and in a third, just completely wrong and wall-banging. And of course, another reader might have a completely different “line” placement and a completely different opinion.

I see the distinction between the excruciating moments and those that are “merely” heartbreaking, and love them both. A true favorite of mine will usually have at least one incredibly heartbreaking scene, that I love to reread.

Sam telling Alyssa about Mary Sue (name?) is a favorite heartbreaker. More excruciating is the hero’s discovery of and reaction to a secret the heroine is keeping from him in Jo Goodman’s Let Me Be the One Lorraine Heath’s westerns have so many, I can’t offhand think of just one. Forbidden by Elizabeth Lowell has a scene in which the hero is both physically and psychologically torturing the heroine, more than he really realizes. And then later another scene in which it really hits him what he’s done. Both wonderfully excruciating.

I don’t really see those scenes in The Shadow and the Star as excruciating or heartbreaking, just endlessly fascinating. Or perhaps I have just read them so often, the initial impact has changed.

Here’s the worst part: I never even found out how it ended, because we didn’t get the magazine anymore!

Aahh!! AAAAHHH! Now I’m dying to know too! Criminy, how wretched. I can see why it’s stuck with you.

I’m sad, ’cause I really like the author, generally speaking. I’m hoping the next one works better *crossing fingers*

I think that one that has been most powerful for me, probably because I encountered it at such a young age, was a serial story told in a magazine involving an American hero and a Chinese heroine. She was a former ‘hostess’ or dancing girl or some such, and when she isn’t home one night as expected all his insecurities come and and he accuses her most viciously of having returned to her former habits. She says nothing, just listens to him rant. He leaves their apartment in a rage, has to visit the facilities (this is at a time when there were shared bathrooms on each floor), sees the residue of blood in bathtub, and realizes that her dormant tuberculosis has returned and she had an attack when he thought she was with someone else. He tears back to their apartment in guilty regret – but too late, she’s gone.

Here’s the worst part: I never even found out how it ended, because we didn’t get the magazine anymore!