Compass Flame

Fourth grade was a weird year for me. It led to other weird years, which have made up my life up to this point.

For context, I have an older brother. When he aged into middle school, we had to switch our school campus. All of the people I knew and the halls I had spent hours and hours in were switched. I left my friends, got glasses, and attended class with a new group of 20ish kids who all knew each other since they were in kindergarten.

This was the year, and the event, that made me very aware of everything. All of my comforts were stripped away, and I felt shy. I didn't know how to interact with strangers in that capacity. Who was I? Where did I belong? How do I talk to people?

One day at recess, I was climbing something or swinging, when the teacher changed my life forever. She told two girls to be my friends. And they were.

They were smart, top of the class or within the top five. They read. They got awards. Just being around them made me want to be better. They never picked on me for my grades or pushed me to do better. It was like osmosis with good habits, passively encouraging me to be smart like them.

I started picking up chapter books. I had read some before, but never sat down and made a huge point to do it for entertainment. That year, I got in trouble for reading chapter books during instruction time, almost failed history because fiction was far more interesting, and stared into space a lot.

Some time in the last part of that year, I was browsing the library for something new to read. I was still a little intimidated by books that boasted higher reading levels, but nothing ventured will lead to nothing gained.

That's when I found a book that would ignite my love of reading forever. From the shelves I pulled The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. At the time, the book looked huge. It confused me in places, but as I followed along the mysterious death of Mr. Westing and why he gathered sixteen nearly perfect strangers as his heirs, I fell in love. The excitement. The characters. The lake-side hotel. The mansion on the hill. It was all I could think about, even as I turned the last page. I was ablaze.

I adored it. I sucked in every chapter, every paragraph, every word like it was life-giving rain. And the ending! The simplicity of it all made me feel silly for not seeing it sooner.

Through the next year and through middle school, I read. The Warrior Cats series, the entire Little House on the Prairie collection, the Eragon series, and other fantasies all soaked into my mind as I perused their cream-colored pages. I sought out the high I felt from The Westing Games like an addict. Sometimes I found it, like when I read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi in middle school as summer reading. Other times I felt doused, like when Christopher Paolini described a desert for far too long in one of the Inheritance books.

As life grew more difficult with the unironic dramas of high school, I fell out of reading. When the drama subsided, I dabbled in writing to drain the stress of real life and work through what happened. Suddenly, I was sucked into the world of writing.

Boom Boom Boom

I filled journals with messy letters. My mind dredged information from all of the stories I had read over the years and combined it with all of the lessons school bore into me about writing. I wrote and rewrote, I felt the bareness of writers' block, and learned a million little things about crafting a world and a story of my own. I self-published two books, Skeletons: Book One and Skeletons: Book Two, by the time I turned twenty-one and kept working on my other stories.

During my time writing, I found reading to be difficult. The voice of the writer seeped into my head, and suddenly I no longer sounded like myself on the page. I took breaks from writing to read and took breaks from reading to write. Of course, I found other books I love, like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and anything by Edgar Allan Poe.

But I found it difficult to feel the same burning hunger I had when I first read The Westing Games. Was it just a fluke? Was it the joy and imagination that only children seem to possess? Was it a memory saturated by nostalgia?

Maybe, until I rediscovered the title of the book through mindless online scrolling. I bounced up and down with excitement as I looked it up on Amazon and ordered it. Once I got it, I devoured it in one day. It was just as delicious as I remembered.

It was beautiful, exciting, and I hung onto every word as the mystery unfolded before me. It was my first book of 2023, and the first book I had completed since the start of 2022 or earlier.

Since then, I have read one more book called The Heart Shot by Emily Schneider (lots of fluff and tries to be deep, but I wanted a lot more from it.) Then I borrowed Catch-22 by Joseph Heller from my brother (it's funny and serious at the same time, I see why it's a classic.)

My third complete book, Lonely Forest, is set to come out this September. I can only hope that it has the same effect on someone that The Westing Game had on me: sparking a deep yearning for reading and lighting a path to more.

So, if you have any book recommendations, please let me know. I would love to catch another paper fire.