THE BLOOD SPELL
by C.J. Redwine
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BORN IN A LIBRARY
I was lucky. My family had no television. No brand name clothes or popular toys. No money for eating out at restaurants or impulse buys. What we did have were library cards and the tradition of spending every Tuesday afternoon at the public library. In my memory, the library is an imposing two story edifice of gleaming white stone with a wide, circular drive. The children's section took up the entire left half of the first floor. My mother, a voracious reader herself, would turn my sister and I loose to wander the aisles, listen to books on tape at the little activity center, and choose our stack of stories to bring home with us. We had a 20 book limit--the max the library allowed each person to check out per week--and we never failed to find 20 fascinating stories to explore.
There was an aisle, far from the center of the children's floor with its bright rug and puppet shows, where a collection of older volumes sat on a middle shelf, the last book leaning against a metal bookend to keep the stack from collapsing. Andrew Lang's collection of fairy tales, a series with jackets in bold colors, beckoned me every time. I would check out stacks of Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, The Black Stallion volumes, and some Little House on the Prairie, but always, always a volume of fairy tales. Every week, a different colored volume to be hungrily devoured as if I hadn't already read it dozens of times already. The fairy tales were dark forests, strange monsters, and magic breathlessly beckoning me to believe in terrors that could be defeated if one had enough courage and cleverness. I couldn't get enough.
Readers often ask me where I got the idea for the Ravenspire series of dark epic fantasies inspired by fairy tales. I tell them those books were born in a library. If not for the library, I would never have visited so many magical lands. I wouldn't have marveled at Thumbelina or cheered on the Girl With No Hands or wondered how the prince would catch the 12 Dancing Princesses or how the evil stepmother in Snow White would get her due. The library unlocked my imagination, gave me a passport to little tales that always felt like the summary of a much bigger story, and eventually sparked my creativity when I put pen to paper and began expanding on the stories that had, for so many years, felt like part of my DNA.
I was lucky. I spent my childhood in a library.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C.J. Redwine is a New York Times bestselling author of YA fantasy novels, including the Ravenspire series of fairytale retellings and the Defiance trilogy. She’s still waiting for her letter from Hogwarts. Currently, she lives in Nashville with her husband, five children, three pets, and a wardrobe that stubbornly refuses to lead to Narnia, no matter how many times she tries.
Author website:
https://cjredwine.blogspot.com/
Instagram: @cjredwine
