When I was about six or seven years old I was very used to my mother reading me bedtime stories in my bed in Umeå, Sweden. I had recently become a member of a book club which delivered it’s books to it’s members mailboxes. Therefor, I had a lot of books collected in a pile next to my bed, waiting to be read to me by my mother before bedtime. However, one night, my mom told me she was too tired to read me my bedtime story and proposed I’d read it myself. I got very angry but she did not cave. Eventually I reached down to my pile of books and grabbed the first one. It was “The Crystal City (Sea Girls)”, or as you read it in Swedish: “Kristallstaden (Sea Girls)”. I started reading and I was immediately hooked. After that, my mother never needed to read me another bedtime story again since I actually preferred reading them myself.
This book was the very one that made me fall in love with reading. Since then I’ve read more books than I could even care to count and I aspire to write one myself one day. This book started it all and I still have a tiny necklace that the book club sent out as well together with this book. A necklace with the Sea Girl symbol on it.