The Power of Reading or What Might Be the First Fantasy Book I Ever Read

This may be the very first Fantasy-with-a-capital-F book I ever read on my own.

The Blurb

 Shelley and her younger brother, Georgie, are getting worried! They made up a game–an elaborate series of athletic “trials”–to cheer up their little sister, Lucy, who’s recovering from a bad illness, and now she’s getting all weird about it. Everyone had been so pleased when Lucy won the contest despite her weakness that they decided to celebrate. They crowned her the Rellard, Wielder of Power, and conferred upon her a special “magic talisman.” It was fun at first, until the game started to take control! Now Lucy believes in the magic and claims that a fantastic winged creature has asked their help to fight a dark and terrifying evil. Georgie and Shelley don’t know what to think. After all, the Rellard is just a game…isn’t it?

I don’t remember when I first read it, but it was published in 1989. I remember that it was about then that my teachers were getting concerned with my reading. I’d been carrying my mom’s 1100+ page copy of Stephen King’s It around with me, and apparently SK was deemed too “adult” for a 9 year old kid. They started gifting me books at that point, “age appropriate” books that I read but that fell flat to me.

I remember, before that year, reading all sorts of stuff. I’d sped through Encyclopedia Brown, The Little House on the Prairie series, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew,  all the Bunnicula books, and nearly an entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica’s from circa 1962. I had a reputation in my family for being a reader by then – for being “the smart one” – but I really read because I didn’t have anything better to do.

Anyway, I don’t remember how I ended up with this paperback. I was a carnivorous library user, but I don’t remember actually having very many books of my own as a child. I do remember pining over all the descriptions in the Scholastic fliers we’d get at school, dreaming of all the stories I could read if only we had the money. I didn’t remember this particular book at all, though, until a user at Goodreads helped me find it. (If you are in need of similar services, try the “What the Name of that Book?” group. It might take awhile, but they’re very helpful.)

In any case, I was very happy to discover this book again, and I wanted to share it with all of you.