Book nerdery, junior edition.

As a geek mom, little warms my heart as much as seeing my children, ages 9 and 11, fulfill their destinies as book nerds. A precocious reader myself, I expected to have early readers, but, as always, they were on their own time. They didn’t really like the reading-level offerings at school, with simplistic plots and cartoonish artwork, but I knew that pushing it would backfire. Working closely with their teachers, while continuing to read all the time at home, we bridged the gap with nonfiction for the fact-loving boy and rhyming, funny books for the nitpicky girl. For me, it was about trusting my instincts as a mom and trusting that children who grow up loving books will make that leap to loving to read books. And when they were ready, they did.

My son just finished the 20th book in the Redwall series. (That’s 20 books in just less than 11 months, folks, plus plenty of nonfiction, school and side reading.) It was touching to see him feeling the way you feel at the end of a series of books: Satisfied, proud, and yet, a bit wistful. I remember reading a book (or maybe it was an article), by horror writer Stephen King, where he talked about how some readers would approach him and ask, “Whatever happened to so and so?” from one of his books, as if the characters were friends that King heard from now and then.

Written out, that seems crazy; we know the characters aren’t real. But, when you invest yourself in a long book series, those characters become part of your life in a tangible way. And so, there is something akin to mourning when you close the book for the last time. Luckily for my son, the 21st book will be coming out in the fall, so he doesn’t have long to wait for the reunion. And while I may live to regret this, I found a Redwall Wiki, where he can (with supervision and with ads blocked) geek out to his heart’s content on the minutiae and reconnect with those fictional friends, at least until they can visit us again.