This week’s prompt in the #MFRWAuthor 2018 52-week Blog Challenge is: A book that has influenced my life.

As usual, I can’t pick just one, but two children’s books came immediately to mind: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth Speare.

When I was in grade school, Little Women was my favorite book. I can’t remember how many times I read it, always identifying with Jo, of course. And I cried every time Beth died. My mom used to get annoyed at me and ask, “Why do you keep reading it when it makes you cry?” My answer was always a sobbing, “Because it’s so good!”

I think Jo March was the reason I, too, wanted to be a writer.

The other book that I remember with great fondness from my middle school days is The Witch of Blackbird Pond, the 1959 Newbery Medal winner. If you don’t know the storyline, it’s about Kit Tyler, a teenage girl who leaves the relative freedom of her life in Barbados to stay with Puritan relatives in Connecticut in 1687. She meets a dashing young man name Nat and a Quaker woman living in isolation, whom the colonists suspect of being a witch. The Goodreads description, calls it a “portrayal of a heroine whom readers will admire for her unwavering sense of truth as well as her infinite capacity to love.”

There’s a bit of romance in the book between Kit and Nat, and I credit this book with my preference for historical romance, as well as opening my eyes to the evils of religious persecution.

While Little Women was a contemporary novel when it was written, it always seemed historical to me, set in the Civil War as it was. And The Witch of Blackbird Pond was written as a historical, my all-time favorite genre.

What book(s) influenced your life?

Linda

Click on the linky list below for more influential books.