One book-related memory I have is an incident that helped me learn a lot about myself happened when I was about 12 or 13. I was at my dad's house and I somehow came into possession of a thick, pink, paperback romance novel called Dawn of the Morning. I started reading it sometime late in the afternoon. I remember "zoning out," curling up in a comfy spot in the living room and ignoring my little sister who wanted me to be less boring, ignoring the preparation of dinner, and ignoring several calls to that dinner until they finally dragged me away from my book to go eat. After dinner, naturally, I went right back to reading.
Only my sister will actually be able to imagine this scene--I can't really do it justice in a blog post--but as I read into the evening, my dad fell asleep on the saggy couch he often slept on, my sister went to bed in our bunk-bed, and I just kept sitting in one of the only clear, clean spots in the room--a wooden dining room chair perpendicular to the couches. I sat with my back hunched over, I sat with my legs crossed, I sat with my back straight up, I contorted in ways you should probably not contort in a stiff wooden chair, but as the hours passed, no matter how uncomfortable I was in that chair, I kept on reading the awesome, beautiful story.
Essentially, in the 1820s a young woman named Dawn finds herself engaged to a con artist, but he runs off and his younger brother, in order to help repair the damage to the family's honor, marries her in his stead. Dawn thinks she is an imposition on him, so on their wedding night she runs away. She runs away to face the challenges of being a single, working woman in America during the early 19th century.
The thing about the novel was...It was just too damned exciting to put down. Dawn had these great adventures and misadventures, and I wanted so badly to know how it all turned out. I had to know she would find the strength to pull through homelessness, destitution, near-starvation, and several arguments with members of the male species. And as she did just that, she became this strong, independent woman--unexpected (in my opinion) for a romance novel. Her growth was fascinating to me. So I didn't put the book down once. It was early in the morning--about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.--when I finally finished reading. I have never forgotten that experience--that love of letting the excitement and anticipation carry you through from one chapter to the next...And that desire to follow a story through to its conclusion, no matter how long it takes.
AND SO, as a young adult, finding out that Grace Livingston Hill was an extremely prolific Christian romance novelist from the 1900s, was shocking. It'd be like reading The Butterfly Tattoo by Philip Pullman, loving that book for a decade, then one day finding out he wrote a shit ton of other books (like the His Dark Materials and Sally Lockhart series'), as well as finding out that he has spent most of his life as an educator. It's not that the things themselves are shocking. It's that you're shocked you never found out about them or realized them before! How could I have loved that book so much and not have really known who GLH was before now?
And this brings me to the book I read today, a biography of Grace Livingston Hill, authored by her youngest grandson, Robert Munce. This biography recounts GLH's entire family history insofar as it directly affected her life. It was pretty revealing in some ways, and glosses over drama in others. Well, not so much glosses as states the facts about a particularly rough point in her life, decides that the issue was resolved with faith in God, and moves on just as she (theoretically) would have moved on. The picture it paints is of a determined, hard-working, enterprising, and staid yet creative woman, for whom God and family were most important in the world. Once I had finished the book, I had no doubt why and how she had spent about 50 years writing over 100 books, most of them either light, seemingly-secular, romance novels or explicitly Christian, romance novels.
I loved learning more about the author who inspired me as a girl to devour the books I enjoyed, and to enjoy the books I devoured. Yes, this biography, like her books, was pretty wholesome, but that's what she would have wanted. And even wholesome stories can contain their fair share of excitement and intrigue. *cough* COUGAR *cough* If you know and love Grace Livingston Hill's books, this is definitely a biography worth reading.
~7/10~
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