After all this time, it's held together with rubber bands and Scotch tape, the pages weathered and dog-eared. Mike has sat at my bedside ever since-traveling with me from Minnesota to Ohio to New York and, finally, to California. Figuring that if he'd swiped it, it must be juicy, I hightailed it to my room, slid under the covers of my canopy bed, and dug in. I didn't stop to wonder why he would have boosted a love story, first published in 1947, about a plucky 16-year-old girl who married a Mountie. ANTHONY, the Minneapolis junior high my brother had attended. The manila library pocket, its checkout card intact, was stamped SUSAN B. Mike, with its cover illustration of a parka-clad girl on a dogsled, stopped me. I'd snuck in there to snoop for contraband issues of National Lampoon, which my mother insisted he hide from me (already possessed of a journalist's curiosity, I took that as a challenge). Mike when I was in sixth grade it was buried under a stack of tattered comic books in my older brother's room. It taught her about dreams, about love, and-in a remarkable plot twist-about the courage it takes to really live. For Peggy Orenstein, it was one of those books-the kind you keep forever and read again and again.
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