What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”
A Candle in Her Room by Ruth Arthur tells the story of several generations of a family haunted by a charismatic and evil doll. It scared me silly as a kid, so of course I read it over and over and over. A large part of the appeal was that the book takes place in England, maybe in Cornwall or Dover, some place with cliffs at any rate, and the characters were named Briony, Dilys, and Dido–all wonderfully exotic to American me.
Not sure whether I’ll introduce it to Bea, or let her discover it on her own… I do have a copy for her. I don’t believe in sheltering children from books, but it’s different when it’s your own child.
