Come and Get It

Abstract

On a family road trip recently, I visited a used bookshop in a tiny, touristy South Dakota town. The sign outside called attention to the first editions and rare books inside. How could a car full of booklovers resist, even with the promise of pie just down the street? So we browsed, showing off our discoveries to one another—old National Geographics, quaint volumes of Shakespeare from the Harvard Classics “Five Foot Shelf” series, obscure collections of nature poetry, and anthologies of Native American tales. I picked up A White Bird Flying, a Beth Streeter Aldrich novel I had loved as a teenager, and knew immediately I wanted to reread it. It was like that scene in Somewhere in Time, where (the oh-so-romantic) Christopher Reeve accidentally pulls out a relic from the 1980s and lurches unexpectedly out of his period costume drama, hurtling away from (the always anachronistic) Jane Seymour. There was something vivid and time lurching about this book. I had to have it.