david arnold » The Novel Hermit

Do you ever wonder about what books shaped the lives of the characters you read about? What were Kami Glass from The Lynburn Legacy, Seth from More Than This, or Taylor Markham from Jellicoe Road reading? What books did they love?

In Essential Reading, readers and authors share five to seven books (children’s, YA, general fiction, romances, nonfiction, and all) that they or their characters love, or has impacted their lives or their characters’s lives.

I’m incredibly excited about this series. I wanted to do a feature that focused on authors and their characters, and that gave me the opportunity to contact authors, and voila! We have this lovely feature. It’s a great idea, right? Because we all have those favorite books we hold close to our heart, but what about those characters? They are readers too; they must have books they love.

So, I am very honored to have David Arnold, author of Mosquitoland, kick off this feature. Let’s give him a warm welcome!

**Dear David Arnold and Mosquitoland,**

Gah, Who knew I was going to be excited about a book with that name? Not I!

[quote cite=”Goodreads” url=”https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21921204-mosquitoland”]”I am a collection of oddities, a circus of neurons and electrons: my heart is the ringmaster, my soul is the trapeze artist, and the world is my audience. It sounds strange because it is, and it is, because I am strange.”

After the sudden collapse of her family, Mim Malone is dragged from her home in northern Ohio to the “wastelands” of Mississippi, where she lives in a medicated milieu with her dad and new stepmom. Before the dust has a chance to settle, she learns her mother is sick back in Cleveland.

So she ditches her new life and hops aboard a northbound Greyhound bus to her real home and her real mother, meeting a quirky cast of fellow travelers along the way. But when her thousand-mile journey takes a few turns she could never see coming, Mim must confront her own demons, redefining her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane.

Told in an unforgettable, kaleidoscopic voice, “Mosquitoland” is a modern American odyssey, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.[/quote]

Let me tell you why I need this book: