The American Girl by Kate Horsley is a riveting psychological thriller about an American exchange student in France involved in a suspicious accident, and the journalist determined to break the story and uncover the dark secrets a small town is hiding. We're thrilled to be sharing a guest post from Kate on the blog today!
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I grew up in a town where the library was next door to the pool. I visited both once a week and I used to wonder if the library put the plastic covers on the books so kids could go swimming while they were reading. My mom never let me try this theory out for some reason.
I LOVED my library card. It was my first ID and I pretended it was my Secret Agent Card as I hunted down my next book-adventure: novels by Lois Duncan and Judy Blume, Angela Carter and V.C. Andrews, Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle. In summer, I’d check them out of the library and guzzle them down in one heady gulp, spread out on the grass in the park sun-bathe-reading. In winter, I’d sit cross-legged between the rows of books, reading half of A Wrinkle In Time before I’d even checked it out.
Other books have intervened between then and now. In fact, I decided I loved books so much I worked as a librarian for a year and once I even took a course in old books where the professor told us we could guess the date for the book by licking the vellum pages (I did and they tasted like dusty beef jerky). Still, I think it was that library I went to as a kid that really made me want to be a writer. Those first books I took out for myself—stories like The Eyes of Karen Connors, in which girls plunge into a world that’s intense and unknowable for the first time—held such magic between their plastic-bound covers. Years later I’ve sought them out again to recapture the feeling they gave. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m writing.
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Thanks, Kate! The American Girl went on sale today, so help us celebrate this book birthday by diving right in!
-Amanda