Story

I love story. I love the places it can take you to. I love the people you meet in it. Story is a passage way into my imagination. A well written story invades my mind and my imagination comes to the rescue. It makes sense of the parts that my mind doesn't recognize. My imagination constructs wild animals that I've never seen the likes of. It collects the descriptors of a place written about and builds it; either city or small house. I love story.

As I flip through the pages of a book, my imagination either thrills at the entries or sighs and says "I've seen this before." The last book I read made my imagination thrill. There were people "graced" with special abilities, powerful women who charged themselves with fighting for the weaker of their sex, and a romance that wove throughout. This story I couldn't put down. I rushed through it; from front to back. My imagination screaming with delight.

As I drew to the end of this story I felt as if I was about to loose something. Like the last day of a vacation, I couldn't really enjoy the last pages of this book, because I knew it was about to end. Reluctantly I finished. I then searched the few empty pages at the back of the book. I read the front and back flyleaf. I closed the book and turned it over and over in my hands (maybe hoping that a certain amount of turns would open a secret door back into the story I'd just left). I found no hidden messages or doorways, only the tease of a prequel to be written at an unknown time in the future.

This is somewhat ritual whenever I read a great book. I search for the hidden track, desperately looking in the folds of a page or at the bottom of a flyleaf. One or two books have satisfied me in providing a hidden something and thus encouraged this obsessive behavior (Fablehaven and Artemis Fowl). If you recognize those titles, you now know something about me. I read Young Adult Fiction. A genre whose audience is often looking for the prize at the bottom of the box.