What a Girl Wants: Letter to Sixteen Year Old Self

Colleen has the latest post up at Chasing Ray for What a Girl Wants. This time she asked what we would say to our sixteen year old self about what to read before senior year. Here's my entry:



Lorie Ann Grover:

"Dear Sixteen Year Old Self:

What I say to you the summer before your senior year is to nourish hope. All this angst you are seeped in will go into your own novels. You’ll figure out what has happened, and you’ll find comfort and truth in: your folks divorce, your grandmother’s cancer, and the end of your ballet career. You’ll write novels about these pains and more, and they will touch others. What is happening to you will make a difference to them.

In the meantime, read for hope and read for pleasure. Find authors' greatest life works and listen. Expand your worldview. Find The Book Thief to relish the most beautiful words, and see hope in man’s history in the darkest hours. Read Out of the Dust and see the tenacity that runs through a girl like you.

Find your own beauty in North of Beautiful, and be empowered to find your true calling through Aria of the Sea.

Take time to read backwards. Without embarrassment, hold onto those middle grade novels that you loved. Dip back into the Island of the Blue Dolphins, cry through Charlotte’s Web again, and explore the universe further with Miss Pickerell.

Know now, that in the future, you will sign your own novels, “There’s hope. Look.” So, go read. Find hope. "