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Books about you

As an adolescent I didn’t care much for reading. Never could I identify with the characters. No film, song or book was about me (© Claudia de Breij). But time does not stand still and now I am a grown woman (mother even) and have discovered that there are books written about me.

If you are a native English speaking person, you may not understand why I say that there are no books written about me. Let me draw you a picture. I am from The Netherlands: a country with a current population of 17 million people. It’s that small dot on the map left from Germany and on the right hand side of England. We’re know for our tulips, windmills, drug policy an red light district.
About 25 million people worldwide speak Dutch in some form. If you know that the English speaking population is about 1,5 billion you’ll understand why, as a child, I had trouble finding Dutch books with gay main characters. There was one publisher, but they went under and so the number of Dutch books with gay main characters can be counted on a couple of hands. That includes the ones that are translated from English to Dutch.

You can imagine how happy I was a couple of years ago when e-books enlarged my world of reading beyond the local bookshop. And thus a new, but pretty healthy, addiction was born: reading lesbian fiction. In my blog I don’t give stars to books but just write down my thoughts. If you want to know the stars, you could visit my Goodreads profile.

I review books for NetGalley, BookSirens but also review books that I’ve bought myself and audiobooks.