Old Friends in New (or Old) Places

One of the many reasons I loved Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me (the 2010 Newbery Medal winner) is the way in which she wove in so many wonderful mentions of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I love it when characters in books reference other characters and stories I know and love. It makes the world of fiction so interrelated, and gives me a definite "point of contact" with the characters, similar to how I feel more deeply connected to someone in real life when I discover we share a love for a book.

So I loved it in Cynthia Lord's Rules when we see Catherine reading the Harry Potter books in the doctor's office while she waits for her autistic brother David at his many therapy appointments.

And of course I've always enjoyed the fact that Jess and Leslie, when they create their kingdom of Terebithia in Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terebithia, refer to Narnia. But I just recently discovered another lovely reference at the beginning of chapter 6, when one of Jess' older sisters is trying to tease him about his friendship with Leslie:

"He tried to ignore her. He was reading one of Leslie's books, and the adventures of an assistant pig keeper were far more important to him than Brenda's sauce."

I wish you could have seen my smile when I got to those words. I must have skimmed right over this line a dozen times before in all the many times I've read and re-read Terebithia in the past 20 plus years. "Assistant pig keeper" didn't send up any flags or set off any bells until now because, until this past year, I hadn't read Lloyd Alexander's wonderful Chronicles of Prydain. But Taran, the assistant pig keeper of those stories, has become one of my favorite characters in literary fantasy. How marvelous that Kat Paterson, writing just a decade or so after Alexander, slipped this small tribute right into the flow of her own story.