Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff

I read quite a bit of children's and young adult literature because they keep those books where I hang out at the library. I have two strategies for finding my own reading material outside of the juvenile section. One is to grab whatever new arrival catches my eye as we walk in the main entrance. The other is to use the internet library catalog to decide on my book ahead of our visit then at the library challenge, enlist the help of my young associates in finding the shelf with the right letters or numbers, collect my book, and get the heck out of Dodge.

Patricia Reilly Giff writes the Kids of the Polk Street School series, which I've never been inclined to pick up (I haven't sunk to reading juvenile series books quite yet, although I do enjoy an occasional Hank the Cowdog). Pictures of Hollis Woods is a beautiful book about a girl looking for a family.

Close on the heels of The Wanderer, it almost seemed as if Hollis Woods was another verision of the same story. Reading it, I was struck by the thought that perhaps there is a universal anxiety that rises up in children around the fourth or fifth grade about their place in a family, about losing a parent or a sibling, about how they know they are loved.

After I had my first son, I realized that I have learned so much about how to love from books. I always felt loved as a child, but my parents didn't discuss relationships very much. We didn't talk about how we treated each other or how we felt about each other, we just, for the most part, did what we were supposed to do and assumed the love was or would be there. It was through reading that I discovered all of the invisible elements of loving another person. It was through reading that I experienced empathy and got my first glimpses of how to practice it on my own.

And that understanding of love is one of the reasons I feel so lucky to have been hard-wired to be a reader. To live in the world without loving someone else--resounding gong or clanging cymbal indeed.