The first Elsie book kind of wrote itself. As I was thinking about a conversation I had with my friend Trent, bits and pieces of rhyme began popping into my mind and formed a story.
Thanks in part to Rachel Ivanyi (my amazing illustrator), the character of Elsie began to take shape and develop a personality and one of Elsie’s traits is a passion for social justice.
That trait combined with the injustices we are now all subjected to daily inspired the idea of a story about banned books. When I asked readers and potential readers to vote for the next storyline, banned books was the clear winner.
I’m not going to go into all the reasons why government censorship is wrong. Others have expressed this far more eloquently than I ever could.
I am going to point out that in addition to being wrong, book banning is ineffective. Human nature being what it is, telling someone they can’t read something is a really good way to make them want to read it.
The debate around this topic reminded me about an incident in my own life that drove home the importance of having the freedom to read.
When our children were younger, my ex-husband and I used to take them to the bookstore and let each of the kids pick out three books.
I was disappointed to find that our oldest child (a teenager at the time) had picked out three bodice rippers (romance novels). I instructed her to put them back and pick out something else.
It wasn’t that I had anything against romance novels. When I was younger, I subsisted on a steady diet of them for a brief period, but as the parent of someone approaching adulthood, I felt it was my duty to steer her mind in other directions. I forgot that it’s not a parent’s job to tell a child what to think, it’s our job to teach our children how to think for themselves.
For the first and only time in our marriage, my ex overruled me, and he did so in front of the kids, an event that shocked them into silence and made their jaws drop.
He gently but firmly stated that reading is deeply personal, and it would be wrong for us to dictate what the children could read. Once I got over my surprise, I realized he was right. It was more important for her to choose a book she liked and enjoyed than it was to focus on the subject matter she was currently interested in.
My daughter and I came to an agreement, one “regular” book for every two bodice rippers and eventually, she outgrew her romance novel phase and went on to read a wide variety of books, including many of Shakespeare’s plays.
By introducing our children to all kinds of books and letting them follow their own inclinations, we helped them develop a lifelong love of reading and a discerning eye for good literature.
My parents (especially my mother) and my siblings did the same for me when I was young and I will be forever grateful to them. I’ve read thousands of books during my lifetime, and when I look back at the books I read as a child, many of them would have been deemed too mature for me. Those books helped make me the person I am today.
I can honestly say that I owe most of the good things in my life to books, including my relationship with my ex which began on our first date with a discussion about a favorite author and continues to this day, more than thirty years later.
I’m looking forward to sharing Elsie’s experience with book banning and hope to release the second book in the first half of 2026.
Thanks for reading.
Eileen Blake
