A fan called Anne shared the following post with me today. It's a lovely, emotionally touching email, so I'm going to say little here today, except for "Thanks, Anne!" and let it speak for itself.

"I wanted to share a little story with you all about the ways these books impact youth who read them. I am a big fan of The Demonata series. I started reading Lord Loss when I was 16 as a school reading project and had way too much fun explaining to my teacher about what I was reading about (This was right after Grubbs first meets Lord Loss). And since then I was sold on the reality that you could find under all the horror and grusomnes in the books. I recently started working at a Juvenile Residential program in Florida for Delinquent youth. And I brought bother the Demonata series and CDF with me for one of the youth to read. I am now imensly fascinated with how fast these book are catching on at my facility. Almost my whole case load of 16 youth have read both series and they love the books.

"The reason I wanted to share this is that I think for a lot of youth in today's society they read and see on social media about the perfect lives they should have. But the fact of the matter is most of them don't. They have endless struggles and make bad decisions and have to learn way too early that life is not a fairy tale. At least not the perfect one with unicorns and rainbows. For my youth at this facility these books represents that honest situation of always getting stuck in another terrible situation and having to make those hard choices even when they may not be the right thing to do.

"I just wanted to say Thank You Darren Shan for writing such real stories about how life is not always easy and filling it with just enough demons and vampires and very little rainbows.

"Sorry for the long post. I added on a picture of my favorite quote, which sums up pretty much my whole blabber here!"