Much like people who can remember what they were doing on the day a major event in history happened, many readers can remember the day they read an unforgettable book
With all the books I’ve read and they number very high, I can still remember my first unforgettable book. I was way past the teen years but somehow I ended up being given a great teen novel. I read it, loved it, laughed so hard. She had a crush on her high school English teacher. It was totally hokey, so was the main character but I loved the way the English teacher knew she had a crush on him but managed to make her embarrassment about it OK. At the end, he wished her success in her life and someone absented herself. She smiled. She no longer had a crush on him but she wasn’t embarrassed. The crush had taken her through some difficult times. She regretted nothing.
I can remember thinking, ah…regret nothing…everything we feel is for a reason and doesn’t require embarrassment. For a long time, I tucked these characters along with me in my life.
Years later, I read more and more books in between university classes. I ran into one called Saving Grace by Barbara Delinsky. This is a book where the daughter struggles with her mother’s senility. Her mother is a great woman, the Ann Landers of her time and gradually the daughter who was very dismissive of her mother, starts reading some of the advice. She ends up having to cover for her mother and in doing so becomes the greatest support her mother has ever known. She basically transitions from kid with a heavy chip on her shoulder for her mom with no place for her mom in her life to admiring her mother and yet watching as she slips father and farther away.
This book changed me too. I can remember just holding the cover of the book to my heart. I loved the relationship between these two women and just how this maturity of her daughter opened her up for a future that was going to be tough to deal with as her mother aged.
The last one I read that really and truly touched me was another Barbara Delinsky book called Coast Road. I totally loved this book. It starts off very odd in terms of a romance. They are two lovers who are lost to each other and divorced. One is in a coma and the other reminisces about the good times. Throughout these memories that the person is so wrapped up in and has time to think about, the person forgives and starts to understand things from the other’s perspective. By the time the lover in the coma wakes up, the relationship is on. They had been divorced for years!
I guess what I took away from this book was just how love does conquer all and that it is never too late for forgiveness, compassion and hope.
There are probably many, many more books that hit me. Still, I read like crazy but honestly, it is rare for books to hit me between the eyes. So when one comes along, I realize it and yes, somehow it does change my perspective.
So what makes an unforgettable book? An unforgettable book has to have these elements in order to inspire beyond the close of the cover:
1. Spellbinding characters. I say spellbinding but the characters can be tarnished or different or even odd balls. But something about them may entrance.
2. Emotions have to be explored throughout the book but not in an overt, obvious way. They have to be explored in a way that makes it totally possible to believe they are real people. So if characters are dripping their emotions everywhere, we are less likely as readers to give them a break. Whereas, if it is subtle, we would.
3. A relationship that is so important to that person’s life. In the book somewhere, there has to be a relationship between a mother and son or a daughter and mother or a father and brother or two lovers or two ex lovers or sisters. The relationship may appear to take second party to the plot but chances are it doesn’t.
How can an unforgettable book change you?
It can not only move you forward but it can also make society move forward. Think about Love Story. This book was on the bestseller list way back and yet people can still remember it. In it, a man is married to a woman he loves to distraction but she is dying from cancer. Sounds horrible, right? But at the time, there weren’t a lot of books out there with characters who were dying. It was so popular in its bittersweet, while bringing society and individuals to the realization that dying characters have a right to have a good finish to their lives, not be put in care if they so choose.
Remember an Officer and a Gentleman? I believe that movie was from a book. It was the movie though that brought the story out to the maximum.
Prior to that time, women may have had jobs but there really wasn’t a lot of respect for it. Here was a woman who was an officer. The man she was in love with didn’t try to hide his love for her. In fact, he made it quite clear they were together by carrying her out in his arms. Imagine how this ideal of having respect and pride in a woman and the movie being unforgettable changed society and individuals. You mean it is OK to have pride in my wife who works a daycare or as a nurse? It’s OK to shout it from the rooftops? With a movie though, the experience is not as personal as reading.
Unforgettable books are the reason people should never stop reading.
I hope you run into an unforgettable book soon.
Robyn Whyte is the CEO of Stargazer Press where you can find amazing books at http:www.stargazerpress.com/novels.htm
Find Kate Rizor’s ‘The Governor’s Wife’, a contemporary romance from this talented author.
Try Victoria Graydale’s ‘The Wizard’s Daughter’, a medieval romance.
Check out V.B. Rosendahl’s juvenile mystery ‘Bitter Tastes’, the first in the Kathy and Martha Series.
Or see our amazing educational resources for teaching reading, home of Stargazer’s Guided Reading Kit for K-3, Stargazer’s Reading Games and Stargazer’s Kindergarten Primer.
Tags: great reads, kate rizor, stargazer press, unforgettable reads, v.b. rosendahl, victoria graydale