“-why had she found the story so absorbing? Of course it was quite possible she hadn't. Maybe she merely preferred a novel--any novel--to reading a newspaper or chatting with the girls she worked with all day. And maybe she always read like that--with an air of having surrendered totally to a spell.”

“Imogen was a bright girl naturally, but she had read so many novels that her brain was completely turned.”

“Maybe she should stop reading those damn romance novels. They were giving her crazy expectations.”

“Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.”

“Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels.”

“Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery ...”