Families reading together

Feel free to blame my sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty on the season.

Just the oth­er day I opened a let­ter from a boy who told me how much he enjoyed my Crispin books, and begged me to write one more.

Love­ly enough, but most unusu­al, there was this: “P.S. From —-‘s mom. Thank you so much for writ­ing the Crispin books. We read them aloud as a fam­i­ly. (I had a hard time read­ing through my tears when Bear died and at the end of the third book.) They are beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten, excit­ing, and very mov­ing. We all hope to hear more of Crispin’s sto­ry some day!”

I won’t pre­tend I did­n’t appre­ci­ate the praise. That said, we often for­get that it is the nature of books for young peo­ple, that the sub­ject of fam­i­lies con­sti­tute its essen­tial sub­text. Thus this image, this notion, of a fam­i­ly gath­ered around and read­ing my books, touched me deeply. I can’t think of a high­er hon­or or achievement.

There­fore, as anoth­er writer, in anoth­er time and in anoth­er book wrote for the same sea­son: “As Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

Crispin at the Edge of the World … Crispin: the End of Time