Continuing with the history theme from last month, this month I'm going to talk to you about Celia Rees's Witch Child.
I first read Witch Child when I was around 12/13 years old, and I can still remember picking it out from amongst the other books on the shelves when I saw it. There's something so haunting and enticing about the photograph on the cover that immediately drew me in.
I don't think I purchased it the first time I saw it, but each time I went into the book shop I kept making eye contact with this book, and I kept picking it up and reading the blurb and feeling the weight of it in my hands.
It wasn't just the physical book that interested me, but the story inside. As I've mentioned many times before I've always loved history, but I never really read that much historical fiction, and I think that's because, when I was younger at least, there weren't many pieces of historical fiction out there for younger readers. I'm sure there were, I just couldn't find them; when I was younger the Teen section wasn't full of all the fun, dark YA reads we have now, it was full of pink books about pretty teenagers who had spots and wanted boyfriends.
I'm not at all trying to shame people who enjoy reading those kinds of books - the contemporary romance books of today - they just weren't what I was interested in. I never grew out of my love for history and fantasy and horror. I didn't want to grow up and read about people in the real world; the real world was the place I was trying to escape from.
Eventually my parents bought me a copy of Witch Child and I adored it. In fact I'm pretty sure I reread it several times because one time just wasn't enough. Like the book I mentioned last month, this book made history approachable for me and other people my age, not by making history gruesome but by helping me to see history through the eyes of another teenage girl. Historical fiction became something I could access, too, it wasn't just for adults.
This is the book that first got me into historical fiction; in fact I think its influence on me is obvious even now, given that I'm currently working on a historical fiction novel that deals with the subject of witchcraft!
I'm 22 now, and I still recommend this book to other people. If I ever have a daughter of my own I'm going to encourage her to read it, too.
Which book do you remember most from your early teens?
Last month I talked about the first of my influential books, The Magic Finger. You can find that post here if you're interested!
This is probably a bit of a weird choice, and it probably says something about me that what first drew me to this book, when I was around 8 years old, was the promise that it was going to teach me about human sacrifice...
A lot of you probably know by now that I love history, and I've loved it since I was very small, so it's only natural that I grew up reading this series. I can still remember the first time I came across them; they had their own little rack in a Wilkinson's that my Mum went into a lot. One day she found me looking at these, so she told me if I picked one she'd buy it for me.
I was torn between The Angry Aztecs and The Incredible Incas, and to this day I'm still not entirely sure why those two in particular caught my eye. I knew practically nothing about the Aztecs or the Incas - which might be why they interested me - but I think it might have simply been that their covers caught my attention.
Whatever the reason I chose The Angry Aztecs when the back of The Incredible Incas told me the Incas used to eat guinea pigs. I had a guinea pig at the time, and somehow I felt like he'd know if I brought home a book about the people who ate his ancestors.
I devoured The Angry Aztecs and every Horrible Histories book my parents bought me afterwards. I was hooked.
I loved the way these books didn't shy away from teaching children, or anyone else who wanted to read them, the nitty gritty parts of history that you don't get taught in school. In fact these books taught me that there was history outside of school I wasn't being taught (something we obviously know when we're older, but I was only 8 at the time!) and that I could learn about it if I wanted to, simply by reading the right books.
These books encouraged my love of history, and encouraged me to do my own reading and research in my own time if school didn't answer the questions I wanted answering. The skills I learned from reading these books are especially important now; writing a Historical Fiction novel means research has become a regular activity for me, and I'm so glad I was able to start with the basics thanks to this series.
I suppose I could have chosen any Horrible Histories book, but it felt right to put the very first one I read on this list. If I hadn't read this one I wouldn't have read the others, and there's no knowing if I might have picked them up at a later date.
What about you? Did you read these books when you were younger?
Last month I said that for the remaining 10 months of the year I wanted to talk about 10 books that have influenced me, whether I read them 10 days ago or 10 years ago. This idea was inspired by the Influential Books Tag that I stumbled across over on YouTube.
Like most children, especially British children, I was practically raised on Roald Dahl's stories. I love Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Witches and The BFG, but the first book to spring to mind whenever anyone mentions Dahl's name has always been The Magic Finger. This is a little odd considering I never actually owned my own copy of The Magic Finger until last year, when my best friend bought me this lovely hardback copy for Christmas.
The copy I remember from my childhood is the one pictured above, which week after week I would get from my local library. I loved going to the library when I was younger, and yet even though there were so many books for me to choose from 99% of the time I ended up taking out the ones I'd taken out the week before. My little pile from the library usually consisted of The Magic Finger and a HUGE dinosaur encyclopedia that my poor Mum ended up having to carry because it was far too big for me to hold.
What can I say? I had an obsession with dinosaurs when I was little, and I was convinced I was going to be an archaeologist when I grew up!
I first read The Magic Finger when I was around 6 years old, and there's more than one reason it's a book I've held close to my heart ever since. From what I can remember it was the first 'proper book' that I read from start to finish all by myself. If nothing else that reason alone earns this book its place on my list of influential books; I felt the sense of accomplishment that came with completing something entirely by myself, and the realisation that I could read a book without anyone's help opened up a whole realm of possibilities for me.
I always loved it when my parents read to me, but knowing that I could read something on my own filled me with more pleasure than I could ever put into words. I didn't have to rely on my parents for stories anymore, I could tell them to myself.
Looking back, this book introduced me to a theme that I've loved in stories ever since: people getting their just deserts. It doesn't always happen in stories, and it happens even less in real life, but I love it when characters get their comeuppance. This is something that tends to happen in children's fiction in particular, I suppose because we want children to know that, somehow, good behaviour - kindness or bravery or selflessness - will be rewarded in some way, shape or form, and anyone who is cruel to them will one day regret it.
I recently watched Disney's Saving Mr. Banks, and thinking about this book reminded me of a quote from that film: "That is what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again, and again, and again."
What I loved about The Magic Finger when I was younger was that order is restored, and punishment inflicted, at the hands of a little girl. It's only a little book, but it's a powerful message, and back then it filled me with a sense of my own importance. Not, funnily enough, in a self-important way, but in a way that made me realise that even though I was little, the way I treated others and the way they treated me mattered.
What books did you love most as a child?
