Or… Moving Past the Shampoo Bottle.

I am the proud owner of a lot of bookcases. They’re stuffed full, overflowing even, with a wide variety of books. Some of them are “necessities”: cookbooks, dictionaries, The Great Gatsby. There’s literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, a smattering of young adult books, lots and lots of classics filched from my mother, non-fiction covering a range of subjects from Al Capone to The First Americans to Toilets Around the World.

What?

It was a gift, okay?

Urban fantasy. Chick lit. Mystery novels. Pretty much everything Anne Rice ever wrote.

I buy books on sale or pre-order novels I’ve been waiting for for months. I pick things up because I like the cover or because it came highly recommended.

I’ve also started this new thing lately, of visiting my local library. It’s been, sadly, years since I’ve been a member of a public library. Too many moves and too much work to really take advantage.

I’m still adjusting to using the library. I’ve been using the online catalog pretty extensively, but haven’t done as much browsing as I would if I were in a bookstore. In an effort to force myself into expanding my horizons, I’ve been trying to grab a book here and there that I would probably never, ever purchase in a store.

To begin with, I started as far from my beginning point (my own shelves) as I could possibly get and grabbed a book from a genre where I’ve never so much as read a blurb.

Summer Snow, by Nicole Baart, is an inspirational novel. It’s the story of a young woman (a sequel, actually, though I’ve not read the first story,) faced with an unplanned pregnancy and a drastic change in her family situation. Julia DeSmit is an interesting character and the story itself is crafted in a way that I don’t have a lot of experience with. Simply put, it’s a book where not much “happens.” The characters live their lives, they go to work, they go out to dinner, they paint a porch. By no means, however, is it boring. The tension throughout the story is practically jumping off the page. These are characters just living life, yes, but every emotion, every motivation, is prevalent and tangible.

So what makes it so different for me?

It’s that first part. The inspirational part. As interesting as the book was, as well-crafted some of the sentences, I struggled to truly identify with parts of the story. Simply put, the characters worry about things in a way that just wouldn’t occur to me.

It gave me a great deal to think about, in the terms of how we approach our audiences. The book and story have a lot to offer, but it’s definitely geared towards a specific market. This is true of most books, to be certain, but is the inspirational market more narrow than your usual genre market?

I’ll continue on my quest to read outside my “comfort” genres. Next up? Military sci-fi, perhaps followed by a heavy dash of high fantasy (preferably something with a lot of walking!) But I do find myself wondering if I’d ever venture back into the inspirational genre. I believe good books can come in all shapes, sizes and genres, but sometimes, we have to look into a little corner of the publishing world we’d never considered to really be surprised.

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