I guess it helps to know who wrote it!

Yeah, ain’t that the truth.

I’ve been quiet lately, real life and all, which I really need to tell you all about, but yesterday something rather humorous happened that I wanted to share. Cathy from TN contacted me wanting some help finding a book. She was hoping I knew of it. Well, I did.At least I thought I did. I just needed my memory tweaked a bit.

Okay, more than just a bit, but nobody is perfect. o.O

First here’s her initial question:

I found your website when I was researching Emilie Loring book titles. I am hoping that you can help me remember the title of a book she wrote that I read as a teenager. The bits I can remember of the plot is a poor girl who had to move, with what I think were younger siblings, to the country, and they moved into a converted barn. An apple orchard nearby rings a bell with me, too. But it has been many years since I read it. Do you have any idea which book it could have been?”

To which I responded, all cocky and all:

I definitely remember the book you’re talking about. Very clearly, because we don’t have very many barns like that around here – meaning ones made primarily out of stone – so every time I see one I think of that book. OTOH, I don’t remember the title off the top of my head and I don’t have it in my collection at the moment. Give me some time, though, and I’m sure I can find out which one it was because now you gotten me to thinking about it and it’s going to drive me nuts not knowing.

And off I went to start searching the web, confidently crossing-checking Emilie Loring against “converted barns”. I didn’t exactly get nothing but what I did get was kind of odd because while stuff about Loring kept coming up there was also hits about a Grace Livingston Hill title – The Enchanted Barn

The Enchanted Barn by Grace Livingston Hill, 1917

– that kept persistently popping up and I kept ignoring it. After about the third or fourth search, though, I almost literally smacked myself upside the head and thought, “How thick can I be?!?”

Don’t answer that.

So I emailed Cathy back telling her how surprised I was but also that I was pretty sure that was the right book now that I was open to the idea. It just depended on whether she’d ever read Hill and she had. She checked it out overnight and wrote back this morning:

Dear Bev, that was indeed the book! I read until page 67 tonight, and I am just thrilled to death to find it. I have spent 2 or 3 hours the last few nights pooring thru emilie loring plots online, and could not figure out why I couldn’t find the book I wanted. I guess it helps to know who wrote it!

Heh, what she said.

For anyone interested, I found both a long detailed review of it on Alibris plus a chapter by chapter downloadable version.

But you know, this brings up an interesting thing that’s always fascinated me about popular fiction. All popular fiction. We go on and on about about how romance as a genre is about relationships but let’s face it, popular fiction, all popular fiction, is about implanting strong images in the reader’s minds. That’s about painting a picture, an indelible picture that never goes away. That’s what classic movies do. That’s what classic books do.

They do not become classics if people forget them.

Words paint pictures in our heads. If the authors leave us with an unforgettable image, even just one, that story will be with us forever no matter how much the genre itself is dismissed.

It’s something to think about.

So what book, romance or other, do you remember simply for an incredible image painted by the author from the story?

Related Posts:

• Just a happy ending? I think not.
• Series finales, ugh
• Snow stuff
• Ten Nights of Love: Emilie Loring
• Ten Nights of Love: Grace Livingston Hill