Books as Friends

I've been thinking lately about the idea of books as friends.  Maybe even best friends.  When I was about 15, I read Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword for the first time.  It's about a girl who is orphaned, uprooted from her home to move halfway around the world, where she discovers a mysterious foreign land full of magic, danger, and beautiful horses.  Here, she becomes a warrior and saves the world, but more than that she finally finds a place where she belongs.  This novel is custom made for slightly misfit, horse-crazy 15-year-old girls, and I was definitely a slightly misfit, horse-crazy girl (around this same time I broke my collarbone falling off a horse, and was back riding four weeks later).  I've reread The Blue Sword almost every year since then.  That's getting to be a lot of rereadings.  Not only does this book make me happy--especially when I'm down, I can curl up with it and a cup of cocoa and retreat from my troubles--it's one of the books that made me want to be a writer.  Harry was so real to me, I wanted her to step out of the pages and take me on her adventures.  Since that wasn't going to happen, I wanted to write adventures of my own, and create characters who could also be friends, who could comfort me, cheer me up, and who I could root for and weep for.

This is an amazing thing.  I'm constantly amazed by the power of words, of mere ink on the page, to evoke this kind of emotion, this feeling of loyalty I have for a character and a world that don't even exist.  (The Blue Sword is at the top of the list of books I hope I have if I'm ever stranded on a desert island.)  And it isn't just me.  Everyone who's a lifelong reader has that book, that best friend they read as a teenager and still read because it feels like coming home.

It's such a cliché to talk about the power of literature.  But we talk about it because it's true, and it includes the power to make a kid feel like she's not alone in the world, and that maybe she can make a difference, too.