Fictional Characters

I'd like to be riding a bicycle, doing something important with an undercover spy name, riding through German fields, the long grass whipping my bare legs; bits of past pitter-pattering through my memory as the mauve evening clouds whizz behind me. (Violins of Autumn)

I'd like to be a beautiful city girl, hair blonde, like a doll in a shop, embarking on a forced adventure of horseback rides, squirrel meat, dark mines and little dark bedrooms filled with lotions and herbs hanging down in bunches from the ceiling. I'd like to be in the middle of a dazzling plot; to be the one who knows all the secrets and who has to keep quiet because someone's life depends on it. (Wonderland Creek.)

I'd like to have a long-legged man as a pen-friend, and write down witty, warm words to him after a day of school, random happenings, and a little bit of extravagant shopping. I would sketch some silly things in the letter margins, just for fun and sign off in French to show him how smart I'm becoming. (Daddy Long Legs.)

I'd like to be a poor, grey-eyed orphan with an imagination as brilliant as a thousand rainbows, a tongue with a gracious voice, and a vocabulary to dazzle even Shakespeare. I'd like to be adopted into a red-and-green island, with beaches and birches and ponds and orchards as friends, and enough blossom to fuel the imagination to the next level of brilliance. (Anne of Green Gables.)

I'd like to be the only long-haired girl in a town of fashionably-bobbed girls, and to stand out because of other reasons too; bold faith, bubbly smile; odd potato-sack dresses. I'd like to be someone's best friend, her little rock in her rocky time of life; I'd like to give her comfort and show her hope through God, good people, beautiful photos and melancholy, soul-dripping poems in a queer little book. (The Sweetest Thing.)

I'd like to have a charmingly croaky husband with a mysteriously locked writing room, a small house on an island surrounded by nature-book-worthy scenery, and an old, vulgar car with a Ladies name which, of course, I happily share with the mysteriously lovable husband. (The Blue Castle.)

I'd like to be in a story narrated by an abstract feature of life, a story of books, accordion playing, lists of words, and friends like the schoolmate with the hair the colour of lemons and the friend who painted over hitler to make a book for me; that secret dark-eyed friend in the cold basement. (The Book Thief.)

... This is why I love reading. I can be all these people just by burying myself into the pages and the words and the beautifully woven stories. Magic right there, readers.