Who's in the mirror?

              "Books are the mirrors of the soul." ~Virginia Woolf

At age thirteen, my top favorite book had a main character with bright red hair who was new to school and felt like she didn’t belong.

Did you guess Anne of Green Gables?

No. Her name was Jody.

Sadly, I can’t remember the title of this paperback treasure from the 1970s. It was in a box of donated books I read while sitting in the backseat as my parents drove us across the States one summer. After four years abroad, we were spending a year stateside. I’d been dropped into the shark tank of eighth grade where I was clearly at the bottom of the food chain.

Jody, who stood out with her bright red hair, simply wanted to blend in at the American high school where she was a new student after growing up in . . .  Africa? I can’t remember, but it didn’t matter because Jody was just like me (minus the red hair) and was the first fictional teenage character who was a TCK—Third Culture Kid—that I’d ever met between the pages of a book.

As readers, we love to find ourselves in characters. A good book reflects an image of ourselves: our feelings, our behaviors, our culture. We’re prone to choose books that are in our comfort zone, where we can relax and relate as we read.

But the opportunities to read outside our cultural bubble are numerous, and best experienced while a child is young, able to absorb a variety of ideas before the mental concrete has hardened.

If books are mirrors of the soul, are your young readers seeing themselves?

Tip: Is your child struggling with a specific issue—loneliness, fear, bullying? Look for a fiction book with a character struggling with a similar problem and pass it on. It lets your child know they are not alone.