Guest Blog

I am posting a blog I wrote last month for YA Enchanting Reviews. It was fun writing this piece because it took me back to my earliest days of reading. What was your first experience with books?


What YA Books Mean to Me


I learned to read before I had even started kindergarten. My dad was a special ed teacher and a book lover who managed to instill that same love in me at the tender age of four. The first book I read was a big old text book that I’m sure my father took from some old closet at the school he was teaching in at the time. I remember sitting on the gold shag carpet in our living room reading aloud about Dick and Jane running. That is a great memory for me.

By the time I was in 6th grade I was mad for all things Judy Blume. I thought I had stumbled upon a major discovery when I read novels like Are You There God Its Me Margaret, Deenie, and Tiger Eyes. I remember telling all of my friends in those very impressionable pre-teen years all about these incredible books that seemed to be told from the mind of someone who was just like us.

For me, though, these books provided a personal support system. By the time I was starting 4th grade, my parents had divorced and my mother had moved out. The year was 1978 and fathers didn’t generally get custody of their children. The circumstances were unusual, my mother was suffering from schizophrenia, and it seemed I had lost my mother for good. I could no longer go to her to talk about my friends, the boys I liked, or later, to ask her questions about what it meant to be a girl during those pre-teen years. I had no one to ask about when it was the right time to buy your first bra. What it was like the first time you get your period. How it might feel to fall in love for the first time. So I turned to Judy Blume. In her books I found the answers to so many of my questions. I understood through her stories that I was “normal”, that all the things I was going through were ok, and that one day everything I then found so confusing would actually make sense to me.

Is it any wonder that now as a 39 year old woman, I am still drawn to reading the best YA novels?

Today I am working on writing my first book for teens. It is a personal story that includes parts of my own young life. Even my mother makes an appearance, but I am able to create a world in which we are still able to have some kind of a relationship. Now, I don’t claim to be any kind of writer like the great Judy Blume (heck, I don’t even have an agent yet!), but I can dream right? Maybe one day my story will provide a little comfort for another girl who was as lost as I was. Maybe my words will bring one reader the hope she needs to continue moving forward when she feels there is no one to talk to.

These are the things that well written words and a truthful story can bring to a teen reader. This is what YA books mean to me.