Suzanne Tague

My parents rarely bought hardbound books, which my mother regarded as dust collectors. But when I was eleven, she asked me to choose a book for Christmas. I studied book summaries until I found the right one: an expensive hardback, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, illustrated by Ethel Franklin Betts.

Under the Christmas tree, the wrapped package felt weighty, more permanent than the Ellery Queen and James Michener paperbacks on my parents’ shelves. Unwrapped, though, it was The Yearling. The bookseller had sent the wrong book.

I didn’t want to reorder, to wait.

My mother shook her head. “It’s not the right one,” she said.

Long after Christmas, I immersed myself in the Victorian London of The Little Princess. Sara Crewe’s journey began at Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies. I was horror-struck by her sudden fall from privilege – from star pupil to orphan and indentured servant, banished to the attic. She maintained her dignity as she went about her drudge work. At night in her strange garret, listening to the rats inside the walls, Sara steadied herself, making her imagination work for her. Her story – the artist-hero’s journey – got completely inside me.

I still return to that book every Christmas. Not the entire book, but a passage or illustration pulls back the whole. Yet I’d almost settled for the wrong gift. The Yearling might not have disappointed, but it would have taken me on someone else’s journey. Certainly not mine with Sara Crewe.