YMMV / Chicken Soup for the Soul

• Archive Panic: If you're a Chicken Soup completionist, good luck! There are scores of spinoff volumes, most of which are tailored to a specific demographic (Chicken Soup for the Graduate's Soul, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul...).
• Captain Obvious Aesop: The Aesops of the stories are along the lines of Be kind to others, love your family, make the most of the time you have in life, hang in there when things get hard.... heartwarming, sure, but not really breaking any new ground in the moral philosophy department.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Whereas the book is a long runner with many incarnations and spin-offs, their Teenage Soul collection is the most beloved.
• Glurge: The series as a whole is broadly considered a shining example of the genre, with blatantly emotional tales meant to be heartwarming as they heavy-handedly illustrate simple moral lessons.
• Sweetness Aversion: It's not hard to find readers who loathe the series for its overwrought appeals to the heartstrings.
• Tear Jerker: Surprisingly enough, Chicken Soup For Little Souls while Lighter and Softer has these moments:
  • The Goodness Gorillas are annoyed and saddened by Todd, the class bully, deliberately messing up their charity work, setting his dog on them, and making fun of them with a mocking dance. (Some of the kids admit the dance is Actually Pretty Funny.) Then one day Todd doesn't come to school, and their teacher reveals that a car hit his dog Duke. The Gorillas confer after class, feeling sorry for Todd while also pointing out he was mean to them. Jessica eventually determines that Todd may be a bully, but he needs their help and encourages everyone to write one nice thing about Todd to recite to him. It works; after some of the kids say they like his Goodness Gorilla dance and ask him to teach it to them, he pulls a Heel–Face Turn and joins their group. As thanks, they bring him a Precious Puppy, whom he decides to name GG.
  • "The Best Night Out With Dad" has Danny hyping Victor up about the circus. Then Victor and his father find out the coupon they have for tickets has expired, and they can't afford full-price. Danny and his father selflessly give up their tickets so that Victor can see the circus, and they go to shoot hoops. He considers it their best night.
  • "The Never-Forgotten Doll" has Ellie hearing from her babysitter Miss Maggie about a beautiful china doll she once had. The thing is that her little sister accidentally knocked the doll over, and the face smashed to pieces. Ellie cries on hearing the story. Miss Maggie's birthday is also coming up. When she sees a similar china doll in a nearby shop, the owner says even though she's damaged due to age, the lowest he can offer is thirty dollars. Ellie knows she can't afford that much, and her parents say they can't lend that to their daughter even if Miss Maggie is great. She then takes her allowance of eight dollars and offers to work for the shopkeeper to Work Off the Debt. He reveals that the doll was damaged further due to a wood stain ruining her hair, and accepts the discount. Ellie then does some TLC with a magic marker and a satin bow to deliver the doll to Miss Maggie.
• Tie-In Cereal: There's a fairly successful line of Chicken Soup for the Pet-Lover's Soul-brand pet food, of all things. More predictably, they apparently couldn't resist creating a line of prepared food... that's right, now you can get real Chicken Soup for the Soul-brand chicken soup.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Some of the books are directed for kids, and while the stories are supposed to tug at your heart strings in that sappy, "feel good" way, they sometimes tend to have a series of modern moral lessons stitched together with a collection of serious topics of people dying, dark subjects such as alcoholism, abuse, ugly divorce situations, etc. to learn about the realities of life, even if readers haven't experienced it themselves.
  • Chicken Soup for the Kid's Soul acts as a portable support book, with its tagline promising a collection of happy-go-lucky stories of "Hope, Love, and Laughter." It's supposed to be uplifting since it's Chicken Soup for the Soul we're talking about here, right? But what it didn't mention was that it featured stories that many young readers may find disturbing, especially in the "Tough Stuff" section portion of the book, as it talks on serious topics that go into great detail such as drug abuse, attempted suicide, and tragic deaths. One story talks about how a kid dies breaking their neck when he jumps off a moving train in fear of how far away from home he was, another has someone's friend getting strangled to death while riding in a car, gang violence and almost getting killed, parents doing drugs, another with the parents molesting a little girl for six years, another has the daughter of a drug injection user waking up in her bed one night only see to her horror with a SWAT Team completely surrounding her with their guns pointing directly at her head, and a dog getting hit by a car and getting put to sleep. There is even a section in bold letters called "ON DEATH AND DYING", with a quote stating how everyone eventually dies some day, which can be haunting to kids to read, as death isn't exactly a topic most kids are thrilled to learn about. These are hardly stories suitable for the intended audience, ages 8-13. This would've been more acceptable had these stories been in the teenage/adult Chicken Soup stories instead. There are a lot of parents complaining how these stories made their child cry themselves to sleep, and now many people are being lead to believe that the book is NOT the uplifting, spiritual guide that they thought it was. While the inclusion of these stories were well-intentioned, there's no way they are "chicken soup" for the average kid's soul.
  • Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul has a very disturbing story in which a father makes a little boy shoot a deer in order to teach him about valuing the time you have left in this life. The father surely could've taught the boy a more humane method of the moral, it would've been understandable had the father mentioned how God put animals to nourish them and that's why they sometimes have to kill them and to be thankful for the life that they were given and not to waste it, but that's not what happened and the way it was said and done could very much bother kids and leave a sour taste in even adult readers. There's also someone's mother getting blown up while working late one night, someone's cat getting gassed, and just like Kid's Soul, also features topics on sexual abuse, drug use, and accidental suicide. The intended age is the same as in Kid's Soul.
  • Averted in the Chicken Soup for the Little Souls series, where they made the stories more suitable for a younger audience. Also, the covers actually fit the overall story. Perhaps the folks who created this spin-off realized how depressing the stories could be for a younger audience and decided to make briefer, happier, and simple (although fictional) stories.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: Diane Nichols wrote about how her husband was cheating on her, and she found out when the college-age mistress dialed her and smugly confessed. She dialed her husband John Nichols to ask if it was true. He admitted it was, lied that he was coming home...and went to shoot said college student, Carol Ramon, in the parking lot of her university. Her story is about how she said she had to forgive him to move past the pain that he inflicted on her and their daughters. A followup ABC News story revealed that they reconciled and remarried while he is still serving 18 years to life, and trying to get him released early. Well, it is in the Power Of Forgiveness collection.

---