Excerpt Echoes of Childhood If you love reading books, you know what it is like to lose yourself in a story. Your bedroom drops away and you're in the world of the book, side by side with the hero or heroine. Your ticket to those other worlds depends on the strength of your imagination and the power of the words you're reading. The best writers scoop you up and take you on a ride that ends only on the last page of the book. To create this kind of magic, a writer needs a very special kind of imagination. Most children haven't yet learned to put limits on their daydreams; they can easily imagine flying, or skipping through time, or enjoying magical powers. Children who grow up to be writers have something extra. Along with a vivid imagination, they often have a driving need to create an imaginary world that's an improvement on the one they live in.

Nearly all of the writers in this book had to endure hardships in their childhoods -- parents who died or abandoned them, isolation and bullying at school, or simply a lack of friends or grown-ups who understood and loved them. But somehow these children found the time and space to create their own secret worlds, which were much more intense and satisfying than their everyday lives. And when they grew up, instead of forgetting what it felt like to be a child, they remembered, and put it into their books. Fragments of their childhood selves echo through their writing: the intriguing attic tunnel in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew , Meg's itchy feeling of never fitting in at school in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time , the ghostly clock in L. M. Montgomery's The Story Girl .

What happens to people makes them who they are. This book tells the stories of how six extraordinary children transformed their childhood struggles into spellbinding bedtime reading for kids everywhere.