The Books that Mattered Most: An Exclusive Guest Post from Alice Hoffman, Author of The Invisible Hour
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From the author of the beloved, bestselling Practical Magic series comes a bewitching love letter to the magic of books. Mia grew up in an oppressive cult that considered books evil, but when she discovers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, she falls in love with the book and its author. At its core, The Invisible Hour showcases Alice Hoffman’s ability to take readers on an imaginative journey into the impossible. Keep reading for an exclusive guest post from Alice Hoffman about the power books have to transform lives.
From the author of the beloved, bestselling Practical Magic series comes a bewitching love letter to the magic of books. Mia grew up in an oppressive cult that considered books evil, but when she discovers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, she falls in love with the book and its author. At its core, The Invisible Hour showcases Alice Hoffman’s ability to take readers on an imaginative journey into the impossible. Keep reading for an exclusive guest post from Alice Hoffman about the power books have to transform lives.
In my new novel, The Invisible Hour, Mia Jacob is raised in a cult where books are banned. She finds her way to the library and her life is saved when she reads The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. That novel, in which one woman stands up the rules of the Puritans in a time when it was all but impossible for a woman to do, changes the way Mia sees her future and the past.
I had similar life-changing experiences as a reader. I found solace and escape in the novels I read, and I also discovered possibilities I had never dreamed of before. Much like my character Mia, I lived in books, spending a huge amount of time at the library. My favorite books have remained the same and include Fahrenheit 451, Wuthering Heights and Beloved. When I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a work of genius that takes place in a world where books are perceived to be so dangerous “firemen” burn them, I realized how important stories were. Wuthering Heights, the greatest psychological novel of all time, created characters that seemed more real to me than the people in my daily life so that I felt I knew and understood their souls. Beloved, the greatest American novel ever written, introduced me to a vast range of emotion and language, beauty and tragedy, and allowed me to understand that the best writers have a voice all their own, one that transports the reader to another world.
Perhaps the books that had the strongest effect on me were the ones I read as a child. Those were the books that taught me that magic was possible. I loved the Edward Eager magic series, including Half Magic and Magic By the Lake, in which troupes of suburban children in two time periods discover magic in their very ordinary worlds. I adored Mary Poppins, who was as practical as she was magical, and then I was especially drawn to Andrew Lang books of collected fairy tales, perhaps because there were so many of the heroes in these tales happened to be girls, girls who saved the day, girls who had courage, girls who changed their fate.
Reading teaches us that the impossible is possible when we use our imagination. The books we read open doors we would have never walked through in our everyday lives. They show us other possibilities and other lives, but they also reflect our own lives back to us. Perhaps that was why I wrote about a society that banned books in The Invisible Hour, knowing how empty a world without books would be. Mia learns the same thing that I did in the library. A book is made of print and paper, but it comes alive when we read it. It’s a way to escape, to plan a different future, to learn compassion, to make different choices. I carry the books I’ve loved with me; they’re a part of me now, and for that I will always be grateful to the writers who changed my world.