Library Mama

When I was a wee bookworm, just old enough to bike places by myself, I used to bike to my local branch library about daily during the summer. There I would carefully select books from the youth fiction section, and check out just about everything in the fairy tale section. Now, as a librarian, I realize that they must have interfiled adult and juvenile nonfiction. But at the time, all of nonfiction felt like the grown-up section, and oh, did I feel it as I checked out books from there. There, amidst the Rainbow Fairy Books, I found a book called Beauty. It was a full novel-length retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast. I loved it so much that I checked it out and re-read it every year for the next decade. When I graduated from college, I bought my own hardcover copy with Christmas money (and it’s really difficult to find hardcovers of teen books, especially if they’re not new.) I carried this book with me (and a rotating supply of one paperback) as I traveled around the world with Up with People for a year. I wish my camera was working so I could post a picture of the tattered cover, which I didn’t think to laminate before this ordeal. I still have it and read it whenever I’m feeling ill or beat-up. It was the book I turned to after some particularly icky bits in The Lovely Bones (which I never could finish) kept me up at night.
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