Sara Zarr: Your Spotlight is Ready

Sometimes, you buy an album because you liked the catchy song on the radio.

Sometimes, though, you pick it up because you saw the band playing at a local club and you had that sudden adrenalin rush of amazement, and you said to yourself, “I am onto something great here… something no one else has yet discovered.”

This may surprise you, but I don’t often buy fiction marketed to teenage girls. Nevertheless, I will be buying Story of a Girl, because I have had the good fortune to meet Sara Zarr.

Sara is a young woman of formidable talent, piercing insight, and an imagination so big that only her heart out-sizes it. And she keeps a lively, personal, entertaining blog. I met her at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe in 2005, and one of the highlights of returning to that workshop in 2006 was getting to talk with her again. She is a writer who has no doubt at all about what she was born to do — she was born to write compelling stories that have the potential to become guiding lights for young women. But don’t let that stop you if you don’t fit the profile. Like stories by Madeleine L’Engle and Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle), her stories about girls-becoming-women will delight and inspire readers of all ages.

I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Story of a Girl for your daughter, your granddaughter, your neice, your wife, your mom… or, gentlemen, even for yourself.