did you read this book?
i read this book. when i was about 11 or so, and i loved it. and when this movie was released about a year or two later, i saw it, and loved it. harriet m. welsch, as a character, spoke to me. she was different, smart and quirky, and she was obsessive about observing life as she saw it. she wrote constantly.
basically, she was me.
i can say that harriet m. welsch was probably the first MG/YA heroine that i truly identified with, that i can remember. by the time i met harriet, i had already read a wrinkle in time, which stars my beloved meg murry, and roald dahl had already introduced me to matilda & charlie, but harriet was my girl.
here's why i'm bringing this up.
i watched this movie this evening with my daughter, and not only is it still a poignant reference to life as a middling adolescent (and in general), but it still made me cry. i remember crying so hard when ole golly had to leave harriet, and when sport and janie wouldn't initially forgive her. but that was a million years ago, right? when i was 13!
and yet: the tears still came. and yet, i still melt when sport rushes out of the store, embarrassed because his friend had to help him so that he could afford groceries for the week. and yet i still hate marion hawthorne just a tad.
harriet the spy is one of very few books i remember falling in love with in my early adolescence. sure, i read all the time, but there are probably five books at most that i remember reading until my eyes couldn't take it anymore and i finally succumbed to sleep. there are few books that, with a mere mention, shove me all the way back, back, back to twelve or thirteen year old me, holed up in my room with my nose in a book, wishing life was a bit more like the world i found between those beloved pages.
that's the beauty of books, though, isn't it?
they grab you and then they begin to live under your skin, and they speak to some internal part of you that never forgets their message.
and so when you're twenty-nine and have a child of your own, those memories can still grab hold of you and overwhelm you a bit.
thank god for books is all i can say.
No comments:
Post a Comment