Today is National Shower with a Friend Day.

My favorite showering-with-a-friend scene in a book comes from Linda Howard’s Mr. Perfect (which happens to be one of my all-time favorite books). The scene comes at the end of book, when the villain has been caught and the hero and heroine are about to embark on their happily ever after. It’s not a particularly sensual scene. In fact, it’s funny. Whenever I hear “shower with a friend” I think of this scene, and that’s the best thing an author can do.

I inherited my reading habit from my mom and my grandmother. I actually inherited my grandmother’s library when she passed. I can’t think of a single thing I wanted more.

My mom used to belong to a book club, so there were lots of hardcover books around. One, a favorite of us all, was For Time and All Eternity. (We used to reread books all the time. Books were expensive. Hard to come by.) Although the story was fiction, it took place in years leading up to, during, and after the US war on Mormon polygamy. The heroine was Mormon, and the tale is told from her point of view, sort of. Mom leant the book to someone, and that was the last any of us saw of it.

I searched for this book many times over the years. A few months ago, I finally located a used copy online for an extremely reasonable price. Of course I bought it.

First of all, I never realized it was written by a man. For some reason, this annoys me. The story is about a Mormon woman who loathes polygamy, but lives with it. How can a man possibly understand her emotions? But then, the writing style doesn’t contain a lot of emotion. The copyright is 1964, and writing styles have changed drastically since then.

The first couple of chapters of the book seriously irritated me because the women cackled, gobbled, screeched, and made other barnyard noises instead of conversing. Again, I blame the male author for the way he portrayed the women.

That said, I am truly enjoying getting to know these characters again; to read the story with the eyes of an adult instead of a young teenager. The historical aspect is also fascinating.

Have you ever revisited a book from your youth?

I inherited my love of reading from my grandma and my mom. Most of my cousins are voracious readers, too.

We used to read a lot of gothic romance back in the day. One of my favorite books–and it’s the book that actually turned my sister into a reader–is by Anya Seton. Many of you may be familiar with Anya Seton because author Barbara Samuel is enamored of Seton’s Green Darkness. And Green Darkness is a wonderful book. Seton has written many wonderful books.

But not one of them is as wonderful as her Dragonwyck. Dragonwyck is a gothic historical romance taking place in the manor-system of the Hudson Valley before, during, and after the American Civil War. If I hadn’t read this book, I never would have known about this northern version of sharecropping. It certainly wasn’t taught in the New York State History classes we took in school.

I wish everyone who loves a meaty historical story and a great romance would read this book.