The Books at the Bottom of the Locker

    Recently, my oldest and dearest friend shared an article about issues only hard core readers understood.  She added, “You kept an emergency supply of trashy romance novels in the bottom of your school locker and traded them with friends”.  Oh the memories that one statement caused to bloom.  I was a voracious reader, as a young girl I once hid in my closet and read three Nancy Drew’s in one day.  When grounded, my mother took my books away and made me go outside to play.  As I entered into that hormonal high school hell known as puberty, my ability to enter into fantastic stories made life bearable.  To have friends who were just as passionate about leaving the real world behind and entering a world where the good girls always get the good guys was just icing.  I grew up a child of divorce, money was tight and our local librarian had limited space.   What we had was a craving for romance.  Today, romance writers and readers have respect.  In those days romance books were the soap operas of the literary world.  What my friends and I had were the books at the bottom of the locker.  As I said, money was tight it made no sense for we misfits to each purchase a copy of the same book. Our public library had carousels of donated romance paperbacks that were not  “good” enough to be added to the library collection officially, we could take them with the understanding they would be returned. 
     While each of us had our favorite genres that the others did not quite enjoy, mine were the horror and sci-fi, we all shared a love of the lowly romance.  Romance, the genre that our parents normally wouldn’t buy for us, the genre the library rarely added to the card catalogue, romance.  As hormonal teenagers we needed that peek into an area of life we were so interested in, yet so far denied.  So at times when we were out of the “good” “quality” books or when we just needed a fast reading fix, we would go to our friends locker and search the collection at the bottom.  At the bottom we found so many tales that took us away, from Barbara Cartland’s virgins and lords, to Victoria Holt’s women in danger, to modern Harlequins.  We had “Witch of Blackbird Pond”, “Wuthering Heights”, “Jane Eyre”, and “Gone with the Wind”.  We travelled to far off places, we walked on the moors of England, the beaches of far off Islands.  We travelled the deserts and the seas.  We were the girl who got the guy.  We were whatever we wanted to be and all we had to do was visit the books at the bottom of the locker.



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