Mockingbird Summer

by Lynda Rutledge

Although some things never change about growing up, the time in which you grow up isn’t one of them. It’s forever changing, shaping you in ways you can’t control or anticipate. As each year passes, the only wild card is you.

And the world you grow up in always feels like the way it has always been and will always be. Until it isn’t.

“A book, like music, is very personal. You bring yourself, your own story, to everything you read. It’s a book’s boon and bane. But it’s also its raison d’être—its reason for being—to meet you where you are. Exactly like a great piece of music.”

There is a young moment when the world can suddenly reveal that it doesn’t revolve around you.

“Here’s the thing to remember about normal. In big times of change, normal is what is being changed.

And that young decision would haunt her for the next fifty years.

We forget that it’s our duty to remember to be better, to stand up to Evil when it shows itself, even if it sometimes shows itself within our own hearts.

Because while a journalist’s job is to tell what is true, a novelist’s job is to tell what is truth, to create a world in which you’d want to live, in which everything is just, even if only in the end.