Windows into another world: Brettin Fox | My Bookmark

Brettin Fox (she/her) is Reading Partners’ manager of partnerships. Her first memory of reading was sitting on her grandpa’s lap as he read Horton Hears a Who and drawing pictures together based on the illustrations. 

Brettin always loved the illustrations of picture books, and specifically remembers one of her favorite kid’s books being The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She also thought it was so funny that he ate all those different things before becoming a butterfly.

When she got to elementary school, she found a new favorite story. “I loved a book called Into the Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville—I would check it out again and again from the school library and even memorized and performed a chapter of it for my speech class in 5th grade.”

Over the years, Brettin’s attitude toward reading hasn’t changed much; she’s always felt immersed, entranced, and enlightened when she opens a book. “Honestly, my tastes in reading have largely stayed the same, majoring in fantasy and nonfiction, but now that I have less unstructured time, I am a little more selective about what I read,” she says. “Also, when I was younger, I never really listened to books on tape or anything like that, but now my husband and I do a lot of audiobooks on road trips.”

There are so many new kinds of books around now that Brettin didn’t get a chance to read when she was younger. “I love reading stories about people in different cultures and with different experiences, often referred to as “windows” now,” she says. “I think it’s great that now there are not only more and more books from diverse perspectives but even kid-friendly books that teach about anti-racism. I would have loved that as a kid, and it would have helped me to learn things at a young age that I had to wait until college to learn.”

As Brettin says, books can be “windows” into other worlds for so many kids and adults alike. She believes that reading can show children that life has infinite possibilities. “With curiosity and imagination, we can make the world a more beautiful place,” she says. “We are all part of this human experience together—whatever you’re feeling, you’re not alone.”