Well, it’s happened. Over the weekend I received an email from a teen who said, “My mom says she remembers reading and really liking one of your books when she was in high school.”
The math adds up. Fortunately the fact her mother liked one of my books apparently didn’t negatively influence the daughter’s reaction to the book she read. She was very kind and it was a fun message to get.

I read Anne of Green Gables for the first time this past year. One of those “should-read” books I could just never bring myself to read. It was my mother’s favorite girlhood book, and I’m pretty sure that’s the reason I resisted. I also remember my mother not being too bothered by my resistance because she had always refused to read the book her mother had loved and pushed on her: On Our Hill, by Josephine Daskam Bacon.

I have my grandmother’s copy of On Our Hill. The book—which appears to be a first edition—was published in 1918. That would mean it wasn’t a childhood favorite of my grandmother’s, just one she must have discovered as a young married woman during the year of her first pregnancy and no doubt hoped to share with a daughter someday. That didn’t happen, but her granddaughter, nearly a century later, is suddenly curious. I may have to give it a whirl.
Oh, by the way—I liked Anne of Green Gables a lot.

MQ