By Kaitlyn Payne
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
For me, reading books has become a very healing process. I always felt a sense of pressure to be as smart as adults when I was a child. I pushed myself so hard to excel that I lost the joy in my more academic hobbies. These things that were once hobbies became tasks, and that childhood spark was lost.
As I’ve gotten older and started to work on healing my inner child, I’ve brought myself back to these stories that I once read to cross something off a list. Once again, I have been able to find happiness and joy by reading those stories. I’m enjoying them how baby Kaitlyn would. Below are some of the books that have started to fill the hole in my heart, one word at a time.
- All Rainbow Rowell Books
My first inner child recommendation isn’t necessarily a book, but an author. Rainbow Rowell wrote most of the books that fueled my middle school romance fantasies and I’m still not over it. She is mostly known for her big three: Fangirl, Eleanor & Park, and Carry On.
Fangirl follows timid Cath, who is a popular fanfiction author online. As she begins college, Cath goes on a journey to come out of her shell and finds a bit more than she bargained for in college. In her book Carry On, Rowell gave everyone what they had been begging for in Fangirl. She wrote a full book based off the fanfiction mentioned in Fangirl. If you want context for Carry On, I definitely recommend reading Fangirl first. Eleanor & Park also is a love story, following a seemingly normal boy as he discovers there is a lot more behind the odd new girl at his school.
My favorite thing about these books is they take me back to a time when I dreamed about meeting a cute boy, like in the movies, and had an innocent naivety. Now that I have more experience with real life, it’s nice to be brought back to the times when I was a young fool. And although I haven’t read any of Rowell’s recent books, her writing brings you back to such an innocent time of life that I always generally recommend her as an author. Her most recent release is a book of short stories released last year, called Scattered Showers.
2) The Pretty Little Liars Series by Sara Shepard
These books are a series many of us know and love. The Pretty Little Liars series is full of classic 2000s high school drama, with a crime and thriller twist. While the show is known and loved, the books are a lot less mentioned. Yet they still bring that sense of nostalgia from the storyline. Although the books differ a bit slightly from the show, the storyline progression is more fulfilling, since the intended ending wasn’t changed multiple times throughout. The Pretty Little Liars series is truly timeless and will never be a boring re-read.
3) A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Series by Holly Jackson
The last series that has got not only adult me, but also the younger version hooked, is the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series by Holly Jackson. The first book was released in 2019, with the rest of the trilogy out soon after. In total, the series is composed of three main books and one prequel.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder follows a determined high school student, Pippa, as she works to unveil the mysteries behind a closed-case murder than happened in her town a few years back. As the series unfolds, she continues to dive deeper into the tangled web that she has now created, with new crimes unfolding and old secrets coming to light. There might be much more hidden in her small town than she initially thought.
My favorite thing about these books is the format in which they were published. The small inserts and pop-ups are reminiscent of things you see in books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. While they are not necessarily illustrations, the graphically designed pages format the text in a fun way that pertains to the storyline. This gives the book more of an intimate diary feel, as though this is our friend telling us this story through letters and artifacts left for us.
In The End
Books can impact us so much throughout our lives, influencing us in ways we may never even notice. For everyone who reads leisurely, you understand how much a good book can affect you. With that, sometimes rereading a book that you first read during a formative time in your life can bring up a lot of feelings and memories that you didn’t even realize were associated with anything.
These recommendations have found a way to bring me a sense of nostalgia I thought I’d lost. Rowell through her youthful writing, Pretty Little Liars through their classic storyline and the time in my life that represents, and Jackson through the intimate formatting of her books that gives us the inside look.
Kaitlyn Payne is a senior at FSU. She is working towards a B.A. in English (Editing, Writing, and Media) with a minor in communications. If you want to find all of her favorite Amazon items, go to her storefront. You can find lists personally curated by Kaitlyn of all her favorite purchases by clicking here.
The Kudzu Review 
Leave a comment