21 pages ~

Maybe she’d always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them.

It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when Harry Potter didn’t exist. I grew up with each of the books in that series, and I wouldn’t want to have experienced them in any other way.

Yes, I’m going to talk about Harry Potter now. But I’m not going to talk about how wonderfully imaginative it is, or its complex plot, or how it covers everything from friendship to redemption to the power of love in the face of evil. J.K. Rowling does something else fantastic that’s hard to catch the first time you read the Harry Potter series. In a world as huge as the one Rowling has created, you get something that you don’t usually find in your typical chapter book—characters who don’t seem to play a big role, who only seem like they’re just in the background, until later on they reveal that they have worries and depths and lives that you don’t know about.

I’m talking about people like Mrs. Figgs. The old lady who babysat Harry a few times when was little, and was never heard from again (save from breaking her leg or something) for several years of Harry’s life. And why would you hear from her? She’s just a character who exists to show that Harry’s childhood was void of anyone he could really talk to.

Too often in books, the thing that draws a hard line between fiction and reality, is that most characters have a deliberate reason for existing, while the minor ones are background decorations. Nothing more, nothing less. When the Love Interest walks into the room, you can tell that that’s the person that the protagonist is going to end up with. There is usually a Best Friend character who’s there so that the protagonist can talk about their problems to someone, and maybe they’ll get thrown together with some leftover character too.

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Characters are one of the most important elements of any book—just like people are one of the biggest elements of my life and my memories. After all, it doesn’t matter what happens in my life if I don’t meet some interesting people along with the way.

But beyond the characters in the novel, or the setting, or the plot, there’s another crucial part of every book that’s ever been written. And that’s the person who wrote it. I love that you can get the sense of who a person is by how, and what, they write.

One easily identifiable author is John Green—his books are hilarious, and they cover lots of things like friendships and romance and growing up. But somewhere, I think he falls into the Best Friend trap. Where the other characters in the book are just there to revolve around the main couple, not as people in their own right.

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At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

–Alberto Manguell

Before I get to the books that have impacted me more recently, I ought to talk about what made me such a huge reader in the first place. I have two other things I want to stick into this chapter as well:

a) reasons why some are more likely to leave an impression in my mind, and
b) the importance of not only the story itself, but also the experience of reading it.

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Middle grade literature is everything stripped down to only what needs to be there. No fancy words. No elaborate metaphors. No self-indulgent descriptions caught up in how beautifully you can portray the surface of a lake or the fog one Sunday evening. Usually no dumb teen hormones making up for believable relationships. (Although inexplicable romances still happen.)

Just story, and characters.

I think that people change more significantly throughout middle school than they do at high school. It was always the biggest leap, from the same class every year of elementary to something so much bigger. Likewise, going from picture books to middle-grade literature is an equally large leap in terms of growth.

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Its important to know stories… If we don’t tell strange stories, when something strange happens, we won’t believe it.

–Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

For some reason, a huge part of our culture and upbringing involves being acquainted with a set of sometimes outrageous, sometimes overly idealized stories that involve princesses, magic, true love, and (as they used to be, at least) the occasional severed foot.

Those fairy tales were a big part of my childhood, too. But I tended to prefer the more active heroines—first, the ones who were in between independence and helplessness, such as Ariel or Belle, and then Mulan and Pocahontas on the other end of the spectrum. Cinderella? How much more passive can you be? In those fairy tales I was always wondering why those long-suffering girls didn’t just go out and DO something about their predicament. In one little book, my demands were answered. And of all stories, it was about Cinderella.

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It’s funny, isn’t it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

–Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

Life’s so much easier when you’re still a kid—you don’t have a stressful workload, you don’t have to worry about your future, and your books still have pictures in them.

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What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul.

–Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen

As a teenager, adults are always asking you about yourself. What seems to be one of their favorite questions (and it’s always for something unavoidable, like a scholarship application or a personal essay), is this:

“What are you passionate about?”

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GIRL OUT LOUD is one of those unassuming books, that fools you with its nondescript cover and generic premise– only to blow all your prejudices away from the very start. It’s incredibly funny, well-written, and, most of all, it has voice. That kind of voice. That grabs you and makes you feel like it’s not just scribbles on a page, but a living, breathing person that you feel like you could go out and meet (and wish you were friends with).

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