I've been into reading since I was little. One day, we were in the grocery store, and I was reading a story on the back of the cereal box. I must have been 3 or 4. I read the box all the way to the car, where my mom realized she had never paid for the cereal, and took me back inside to pay for it.
I read a lot of stories in elementary school. The Whipping Boy stands out with one very clear scene. Some context, the story is about a brat who is so rich (maybe a prince, I don't clearly remember that part), that he has a whipping boy. Whenever the brat does something wrong, they whip or spank the whipping boy instead of the brat. As the story goes, the brat never learns. Until two guys kidnap the two of them. Now they are holding the brat for ransom, but they confused the two boys. So they think the whipping boy is the rich kid. Since they want a full ransom, they realize the can't hurt the rich kid, so they use the whipping boy. But since the story is a role reversal, the rich boy actually gets spanked.
Another story from that time period that I read that stood out to me was, There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom. Ooooh boy, that story triggered some funny thoughts in my head. This boy, who kept saying all these mean things to people, and how they would behave when he hurts them, and then he expresses those traits when he gets hurt.
There's a bit of a theme so far. But there's one more story that really brought it home for me. Dealing with Dragons. Dealing with Dragons was about a princess who didn't want to be a princess. She wanted to be a hero, a sorceress, a cook. Just about anything else would be more interesting to her than needlepoint. So she runs away from home and becomes a dragon's princess. Which, makes her parents very happy, since a knight who rescues her would get to marry her, and they were afraid they wouldn't be able to entice anyone to marry her on their own!
To top it off, all the skills she secretly learned on her own gave her the ability to help the dragon she ran off with! She used her abilities and made her choice, and in doing so, she satisfied the people who weren't satisfied with her behavior before. But it is because of her skill set that the dragon accepts her in the first place.
Expectation versus reality. People expect the rich kid to be educated and well behaved, but the rich kid is a brat. People expect the macho guy to not cry, but he's just as human as everyone else. People expect the princess to be ladylike, but she'd rather clean and organize a library and sword fight her way out of situations.
These kinds of stories really speak to me on a personal level.
What kind of stories do you like?
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