A Girl & Her Books
I read my very first romance novel at ten. Thinking about that now mostly has my head spinning about the fact that it's been 21 years since I was ten. Time and age are fickle things, advancing quickly while the daily hours seem to drag on forever. Anyways, it was 2000 and my cousin, who was twelve and therefore very wise and grown up in my eyes, handed me a romance novel she had borrowed from the library. It was a new release and she had just finished reading it and loved it so much that she wanted to talk about it with someone. Knowing how much I loved to read made me the obvious choice and I took it from her gladly. I read it while sprawled out across her bedroom floor over the course of the next two days, not looking up from it for hours at a time. I was totally enthralled.
My memory of what happened in this book are sparse. It was returned to the library and eventually I forgot about it altogether as I was engrossed in other books, a good portion of them more romance novels. Recently I did some digging based off of my vague memories of it and did manage to hunt down a copy. It was The Wish by Marianne Willman. It's not a book I've ever heard anyone talk about since it came out so I'm amazed I remembered at all. I haven't reread it yet but I absolutely plan to.