A Voice in the Wind

My favorite book now is hard for me to pick.  I love so many.  I like to keep track of the books I’ve read and according to goodreads I’ve read 269 books and I’m sure I’ve forgotten to add more.  But for the sake of this assignment I will pick one that is a top favorite.  It’s call A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers.  Rivers is mainly a romance author, and there is a hint of that in her books, but A Voice in the Wind is a historical fiction.  After the destruction of Jerusalem, Hadassah, a Christian girl, is taken as a slave for a Roman aristocrat family under the pretense that she is a Jew.  If anyone found out she was a Christian, she would be sent to the arena to be brutally killed.  This book is about her, her faith, and the Roman family she serves and grows to love.  To make things more difficult she falls in love with the handsome epicurean in the family, who surprisingly falls in love with her.  But because he does not believe in God, she cannot love him as he would like.

I loved this book because it delved into the struggles of a girl around my age who lived my standards but in a wholly different time. Hadassah was so much like me in many ways and her personality and her actions in the book inspired me to be a better person.  She followed her faith no matter the consequences.  Her strength and courage in the book gave me a model to go by.  I loved the historical detail and I thought the author did a marvelous job portraying the beliefs, actions, and environments of the Roman people. The book also gave me much to think about concerning the beliefs of the Romans and the reason for their fall.  It taught me history and gave me an image in my mind of what life must have been like.  After reading this book, I went on to read other historical fiction books to learned and, in a way, experienced history more than I ever could in a classroom.  

Dragonsong

One of my favorite books when I was younger was Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey.  It’s about a girl who finds herself involved the planet Pern’s troubles.  Menolly lives in a hall beside the sea, and her only love and desire is to create music, but her father forbids it because she is a girl. The planet Pern is a dangerous place.  Every two hundred years, gray threads rain from the sky to destroy every living thing they land on.  It is up to the native dragons and their riders to destroy the thread and protect the land.  In addition to the dragons, little fire lizards, miniature dragons, roam the land and are highly valued as pets.  Angry at her father for destroying her dream, Menolly runs away from home, gets caught in Threadfall, befriends nine fire lizards, and lives to tell the tale.  But that’s just the beginning of her story.  Menolly moves on the Harperhall to be trained as a harper, a teller of tales and a musician, but also finds herself submerged into bigger things with her nine singing fire lizards. 

This book is my favorite because it embodies all I wanted in a book when I was a teenager.  I loved fantasy books with dragons and adventure.  The main character Menolly was easy for me to relate to.  She was a musician like me and her personality was similar to mine.  Her struggles suddenly became dear to my heart and I felt for her.  She reminded me so much of myself.  I also loved this book because it reminds me of good times with my sister.  She read this to me out loud as we gave each other back tickles and ate heath bars.  It was a great bonding moment for us and this book will forever remind me of my sister.  The book itself didn’t have a huge impact on my life but it did influence my imagination.  This book and many others inspired me to imagine stories, plot lines and lovable characters.  Dragonsong sparked a huge interest for reading.  After this book I went on to read every other book Anne McCaffrey had about the Dragonriders of Pern.  It sparked inside me a huge desire to read and vicariously have adventures through the characters.  But it also taught me how to create adventures of my own making inside my imagination.