Early spring!  The groundhog says so.

And as Chaucer might have said, what better way to celebrate the sudden warm weather, the rain, the budding flowers and cheerful birds, the brisk clouds whisking across blue sky and the undergrads frolicking about in shorts, than by taking a couple of adolescent girls to the library to do their homework!?

So I’ve got lil E and her friend A after school, and we go to the library to do homework.  Both girls love to read so we always check out a stack of books and graphic novels.  They prefer vampire romances, but anything creepy and melodramatic will do.

So anyway, E asks her friend, “What was that book so-and-so was reading?  The one about the ghost?”

A says it’s part of a trilogy but she can’t remember what the title was.
E asks me if I know what the book is:  “It’s about this boy named Danny who meets a ghost and the ghost takes him to…  to….”
A helpfully interjects, “Heck.”
E:  “The ghost takes him to Heck.”
Me:  “If you’re talking about it as a geographic location, it’s ok to say hell.  It’s not the same as cussing.”
E:  “Ok, so the ghost takes him to hell.”
A:  “And heaven.  The ghost takes him to hell, and then to heaven.”
E:  “That’s in the last book, though – in the first book they just go to hell.”
A:  “It’s, like, divide or divine or something.”
E:  “No, not that.  The title was something else. Something about eternal, or something like that.”

Oh boy.

After some discussion with the head reference librarian, we found that Amazon does indeed have a children’s picture-book version (’cause that makes sense) and of course, we all know there’s now a video game version (inevitable) but not, as I was secretly hoping, a recently-published Young Adult novelization of Dante’s Inferno.

So I went and got the verse translation that had the most interesting cover.  And I told both girls the creepy and melodramatic love story of Dante and Beatrice, which could certainly have ended with one or both of them turning out to be vampires, if somebody wants to get that YA novel in the works.

I figure, even if she doesn’t actually read the whole thing, every page she turns is cigarette she didn’t smoke, or a text message she didn’t send to a boy, or a fight she didn’t have with her dad.  So it’s all good.