I was saddened to hear of the death of the great children’s and YA novelist, E.L. Konigsburg. While she’s probably best known for her Newbery Award winning novel From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, she also wrote many other powerful novels, and she is the only author to have won both a Newbery Award and a Newbery Honor (for Jennifer, Hecate, William McKinley, Macbeth, and Me, Elizabeth) in the same year (1968). She also won a Newbery for The View from Saturday in 1997.  I discovered and read her books when I was in elementary school and junior high and never really stopped, and as both a children’s librarian and a reader, I’ve never truly put them away again.

I scraped together my pennies to buy (George), the story of a highly gifted child with an imaginary friend– who may or may not really be imaginary. I journeyed to an 800 number with the buttoned-up Maximilian, on his erratic travels across the country with his father (and a camel). I discovered the imperfect life and loves of Eleanor of Aquitaine in A Proud Taste of Scarlet and Miniver. I wondered who the mysterious Caroline really was in Father’s Arcane Daughter.

Years later, the mystery and horror at the heart of Silent to the Bone mesmerized me (it is a horrifying enough story that we’ve reviewed it here). Margaret, a minor character in that book, is the hero in The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, a story of hope, love, and change. Of course, the award winners are wonderful books as well, and From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is the one everyone remembers, but with stories that ranged from quirky, funny, and fantastic to touching, thoughtful, mysterious, and even terrifying (sometimes in the same book), there were many choices.

I’m thankful for every time I read something she had written and felt that click that said “that’s me!” For every time she introduced me to someone who lived life in a very different way, or made an escape possible for me without my having to run off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to change my life. Even if E.L. Konigsburg isn’t an author who touched your life, if you are a book lover (and you probably are, if you’re reading this) there probably is an author who did. Today is a good day to remember the door to books that author opened to you.