The Knight Agency Blog

UPDATE: The two winners of Katherine Garbera's SONS OF PRIVILEGE series are Veronica and Mona. Congrats! Please email your physical addresses to contests(at)knightagency(dot)net -- insert an @ sign and period where indicated. Also, Margay (A DROP OF RED by Chris Marie Green) and Lisa F. (WICKED HOT by Charlene Teglia) have not claimed their Take Home Tuesday prizes. If the addresses are not emailed by midnight, March 18, 2008, we will redraw names.

Thanks to everyone who participated. Check back next Tuesday for another fantastic book giveaway!

The novelist's task is not merely the accumulation but the illumination of details.—J. D. McClatchy

There are books that I have turned to time and again throughout the course of my life. Books that continue to illuminate for me some human characteristic that keeps me intrigued. It’s a thing that keeps me questioning and questing toward answers. For me it is rooted in family and individuality. I grew up in a family with two sisters. The three of us girls were very close in age (only three years between me--the oldest--and the youngest) and were often treated as a group entity. In some of my earliest memories I was referred to simply as a Smith Girl.

While I liked that feeling of belonging that having my sisters gave me I struggled to figure out who I was by myself. As a pre-teen I found the books of Madeleine L'Engle and immediately identified myself with Meg. I could feel the same stress she did about her responsibility to her family and her siblings. But also she was lost in the family. Just her birth-order place made her who she was.

Another book that I loved was FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E.L. Koningsburg. I really loved this story because it talked of escape from the daily routine. Claudia takes her younger brother with her and they run away to the city. Something I always longed to do and then they discover the truth behind a donated piece of art.

This books illuminated for me that I wasn't the only one who was lost as a child. And because I'm such a book worm, I found the same sense of self in the books I read as a young woman. I drowned in romance novels which inspired me to be a strong, independent woman and to wait for a man who loves me. Those books made me believe that happily ever after isn't just for fairy tales but for women who want it. And I did.

Some of my favorite authors back then were Johanna Lindsey, Anne Stuart and Rebecca Flanders. But while romance helping me to figure out the details of what I wanted in a relationship the books of Margaret Atwood were helping me answer questions about myself. About my individuality, which is something I continuously struggle with. The book that did this for me was THE EDIBLE WOMAN.

That book is still one of my favorites for two reasons: the first and most obvious is that the heroine goes through a transformation in the book that I could identify with. She goes from being this woman who is bumping along on her expected path (the one that everyone expects of her and the one she herself has come to accept for herself) when she is changed. And that change comes in how she views herself. This book is fiction but I got a lot more from it than just a good read.

The second reason I love this book is that it made me aware of point of view. And that was one of the things I needed to figure out to become a writer. In THE EDIBLE WOMAN the story starts in first person. The heroine is thinking about herself in first person as we should. As we do in real life. Then as the heroine is coming to the change in herself the narrative switches to third person. The heroine no longer is a part of herself but viewing her life from the outside. Then once she is back to herself she switches again to first person.

I love that. I love the way that Margaret Atwood makes storytelling part of the story. How effortlessly she weaves that story and the heroine's journey together.

There are other books that have affected me as a woman and a writer but I could go on for days if I talked about them all.

What about you? Have you read a book that changed something inside you? Or made you feel not so alone?

I will give away two prizes today to randomly drawn participants of this blog. The prize is my Sons of Privilege series from Silhouette Desire.