When I was a kid, I had a lot of trouble learning to read. I didn’t learn in Kindergarten (few did back then). I didn’t learn in 1st grade. My mother put me in a different school where the principal happened to be a reading specialist (my mom was a learning disabilities consultant, so she knew what I needed, I guess). The principal decided that he was going to take all the K-2 reading groups as well as anyone else who needed the extra oomph to get them reading.
But there was a down side, the school was a Southern Baptist Academy, and they were fairly mental about letting kids read things they were interested in vs what they thought you should read. Even for free reading, in the pathetic excuse for a library, they would not let me choose a book from the 6th grade shelf, bc I was only in 4th grade.
In 5th grade, Mom put me back in public school. My teacher was a middle aged man, we’ll call him Mr R. If I learned nothing else that year (and I learned a lot), it was to love reading. Mr R had the most fabulous taste in books. He had a reading contest for the most books read. I tied that year (537 books) with Christian Bauman who later wrote the critically acclaimed “The Ice Beneath You,” about the Somalia war. He bent the rules a little for us bc we both loved to reread “old friend” books.
Christian read LOTR a half dozen times, and this book was one of two that I read, literally, to pieces. The other book will be the topic of a later book post. But this one was by an awesome, recognized, but not “name brand” children’s author: Zilpha Keatley Snyder. She wrote books infused with fantasy elements about the normal travails of childhood. My favorite book is not any of the ones mentioned in her obit (www.nytimes.com/...), so it’s doubly obscure. This one is about being shy, social ostracism, and dysfunctional families. It took me decades into adulthood to realize that the title of the book referred to the shy, mousey girl, not the hippie, wild child.
In my 30s, I discovered that the book had been reissued by the author. I not only bought a copy, my brother saw my copy and he bought two (one for him and another for a friend). Sadly, it’s not in print any longer, but it is free on Kindle. Back then, I wrote the author and gushed about how much I loved the book, how many times I had read it, that I bought a new copy and gave it to my kids, and how much it meant to me. I expected nothing, but received a long letter in return. Sadly, that is long gone with an old email address. But the warmth and kindness of the author remains in my memory. She was, by that time, a rather old lady, probably about 81. Yet she was a wonderful letter writer, her prose was evocative, her mind mentally spry, and her spirit thoughtful and compassionate.
Hint: there aren’t many books that have links in Keatley’s Wikipedia page. This book is one of them.
And if you want to cheat, here’s the book.