A Reflection: LJ Smith Changed My Life for the the Better, by Teen Librarian Cindy Shutts

The death of Young Adult Author LJ Smith was announced this week and I reached out asking if I could write about how much she meant to me. 

Her death announcement from her family and friends: https://theljsmith.com/

Here is my story

I grew up with a speech impediment and a librarian mother. I spent years in speech therapy trying to overcome my issues but my biggest challenge was reading. I hated it. I was not good at reading. I was in the lowest reading  level at my school and I had always been behind. My mom was worried to say the least. My mom always had books around and took me to the library almost every week to look at books. I loved being read to but reading for me was a challenge. I would have to read out loud and school. I was embarrassed to mess up. Reading became associated with shame  for me.

One day changed everything; my mom during the summer of sixth and fifth grade took me to the Shorewood library. I went into the young adult book section and the paperbacks in the corner were in a turn style bookshelf.  I saw one as I spun the shelf called the Secret Vampire and it caught my attention. It was about a girl named Poppy and her best friend James. She had cancer and found out she was dying but her best friend James had been hiding his secret: he was a vampire and he had loved Poppy his whole life. I grew up watching soap operas with my mom, sister, and grandmother. This was the book that screamed I would love it. 

I took it home and read it right away. I have never read a chapter book that fast by myself before. I told my mom I wanted to read the rest of the series. We would go to Borders Books every weekend because my mom wanted me to be a reader and really tried everything with my dad to make me one. Who knew what would jumpstart my love of reading would be a vampire romance? I read the next book in the Nightworld series Daughters of Darkness which was about Jame’s Bad boy cousin, Ash, looking to find his sister and he meets his soulmate Mary-Lynette. I was all in on this series of books. There were four books in the series that came out in 1996 and the next one about Witches called Spellbinder and then Dark Angel. I found a new love of romance and my home in genre fiction, where I started reading everything I could. I then next read the Tortall books by Tamora Pierce and Alanna became my heroine.

I started to read the back list of LJ Smith, moving on next with The Forbidden Game. The story is about Jenny, who is forced to play with her best friends and boyfriend because a boy named Julien from the Shadow Realm has fallen in love with her and wants her to be with him, but she and her friends try to stay in the human realm.  

I think this book along with the movie Labyrinth led me to my long love of villains which I still have today. I loved watching Shadow and Bone and rereading the Grishaverse books and found myself bad in my villain era with the Darkling so much I went to Ben Barnes’s concert. It was awesome and he was super nice! It’s all thanks to LJ Smith who brought me into a magical world of reading.

I kept reading the Night World books and found the Dark Vision Trilogy by LJ  Smith which was one book where you could feel the love triangle with the main characters. The characters go to a special school for people with psychic powers. I was hooked. 

I took a speed rereading class where I practiced rereading fast and the book I was rereading was part of The Vampire Diaries series. It was about Stefan and Damon and Elena, the girl they both cared for, which would later be made into a television show. I was then a full on vampire fan. I was reading Fear Street by RL Stine and the Christopher Pike books. I was so into vampires my dad was like, “Cindy, I bet you would like this new show coming out called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I liked the movie. I bet you would like this show.”

I did and I watched it off and on in the first season but completely fell in love in season two. Vampires were my everything. I fell into the world of fandom and read fanfiction around the works of LJ Smith and then Buffy of course. I know many writers got their start writing fanfiction around the works of LJ Smith. The internet was young and fandom was growing on individual webpages.  

I read the Secret Circle next, which was LJ Smith’s work about a group of witches. Cassie was from Calfonira but moved and found out about her family history of being a witch. More romance and more fantasy. I loved the romance aspect of her books so much they made me a lifelong romance reader. 

I knew early on I wanted to be a teen librarian. I learned to connect with books and develop a love of reading all based around finding that book The Secret Vampire by LJ Smith. 

I was lucky enough to write LJ Smith a fan email when she first put up her website. I heard back from her and I told her about how much her books meant to me. I told her about my speech impediment and how much her books had given me confidence. She wrote back and told me how she had been a teacher and that my words had made her entire week.

She had taken a break from writing and was getting back into it with new Vampire Diaries books. Vampires were back and so was LJ Smith. She got into her groove again. She had taken a long break due to family illness. I was excited to read more from her and then her publisher Alloy dropped her Vampire Diaries books. They got someone else to write them as they were back in popularity. It was a hard blow to LJ Smith fans. 

They could do this because they were a book packaging company and they owned the rights not Smith. LJ Smith carried on working on Strange Fate. I have waited all this time for the final book of the Nightworld series and now it is written and at her publisher’s. 

I became a teen librarian at the end of the paranormal craze after Twilight. I was excited to buy LJ Smith’s books for my teens. I loved vampires and got all the new vampire series that were happening after Twilight. I overheard a few librarians, mostly male be annoyed at the craze of vampire romances. Every time I would hear someone criticize the books or their readers for being less than (because of them being romances about vampires) I would say I had been just a girl with a speech impediment who found the right book at the right time and that book happened to be a vampire romance. Readers find their way to reading all different ways but oftentimes teen girls are looked down on for their tastes and their interests cause they are easy targets.

LJ Smith gave us a world that led to more. It led to Buffy, it led me to Walter Dean Myers, Laurie Halse Anderson, Suzanne Collins, Leigh Bardugo. I found myself all those years ago in the Shorewood Library in front of the shelf with that one book and have always stayed grateful to her for making my life better. I was that teen who hated reading until I was not. I tell this story to all the teens that it is okay not to love reading because I didn’t until I did. I didn’t until I found my vampire romance. 

I think what has made this so personal is I am also losing my mother, the librarian who championed me becoming a reader every day. Dementia takes her further from me and now I have lost the author LJ Smith who opened my world and changed my life for the better. Thank you to both my mom and LJ Smith for helping me find a love of reading.

Filed under: Young Adult Literature