For the Facebook Book Cover Challenge, the rules were given as follows: post one book cover a day, of a book that impacted your life greatly, with no accompanying explanation. Tag one friend each day to begin their own challenge.
Nuts to that, I said. I love to talk about myself. Posting an image without an explanation would be pointless for me. So here, on my long-forgotten Blogger blog, I’m posting explanations for each book choice, which I’ll link to my Facebook posts for anyone interested.
Note: Spirit Walk is the publishing title for a 2-in-1 edition of two books: Walk of the Spirits and Shadow Mirror.
I fell in love to this book.
Jeez, that’s a weird thing to say, Sati.
I know, right? It’s a (slightly) weird story.
I first read this in summer 2015, the same week I encountered a guy online who happened to share a first name with one of the characters in this book. I barely knew the guy online - he was just an interesting fellow on Quora who wrote cool answers about food - but I had a bit of a crush on him, even while finding him intimidating. When I picked up this book a few days later, and saw that one of the side characters shared his name, it gave me a little thrill. I’m strange about names.
And then the character died, and I was absolutely gutted. Not because I loved the character - he wasn’t in the book much, and I felt more or less neutral towards him - but because of the shared name. For a short time, I felt grief, like the real person had died.
What? I did tell you I’m strange about names.
The two books in Spirit Walk are two of my favourites for a number of reasons, but the book also had a big impact on me because it forced me to realise how crazy I was about this guy.
Six months later, we started dating. And a year after that, it ended terribly. Two years post-breakup, I’m not quite over it. Still, I can’t regret the relationship. He was the first person in my whole life to really make me feel loved. He was the first person who taught me to enjoy food, and the main reason I got over a 27-year eating disorder. He was the first person I ever loved enough to go all-in with, and truly consider changing my life for. I learned so much from him: about the world, and about myself.
JML: I thank you for all that. Even while I sometimes want to throw frying pans at you.
And Ms Cusick: I thank you for your glorious stories.