The Reading Room

• Name: Sally Nicholls
• Lives: London
• Likes: Travelling and reading
• Website: www.sallynicholls.com
• Recent Titles: Season of Secrets
• See all titles from Sally

My name is Molly. I believe in magic. Do you?

The people at Red House said I had to write something about mythology, because of what happened to me last year with the Green Man and the Wild Hunt and lots of other strange and mysterious (but totally true) things that my dad thinks I made up (I didn't). I know a lot about myths, because I read so many last year, but I got a bit stuck on what to write about them, because myths are strange.

Myths are stories. Usually, they're stories which explain something, like how the world was made (out of the bones of a dead giant, maybe, or pushed up by the body of a rainbow serpent) or why turtles' shells are cracked (because they were dropped very hard out of the sky... obviously).

My sister Hannah, who is at secondary school, thinks myths are stupid. "They're just stories, you fool," she said, when she found out what I was writing. "And we don't need stories now we've got science. You don?t believe them, do you? You don't really think you fall in love because some baby called Cupid shoots you with an arrow?"

Hannah is obsessed with love. Currently, she's in love with Jamie Fisher in Year Eight, the bloke who works in Waterstone's with the shark?s tooth earring, and Orlando Bloom.

I think the best thing about stories is that it doesn't matter if they're true or not. If you're in love, and you don't know why you love someone, but you know it feels like someone came along and shot you with an arrow (or if you can't understand why your sister would fancy someone as greasy as Jamie Fisher), then actually thinking about Cupid feels more real - and makes more sense - than trying to remember that it's all hormones really.

Not that I think love is just hormones. Love is as mysterious as the beginning of the world, or the cracks on a turtle's back. I think.

Sometimes things are just unexplainable. Ordinary words aren't big enough. Scientific theories aren't big enough. Books and stories aren't big enough either, but they're all we?ve got. Lots of things happened to me and Hannah last year that science can't explain. Scientists would agree with my dad, probably, and say it was just something I made up.

But I know better.

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Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton-on-Tees, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm! She has always loved reading, and spent most of her childhood trying to make real life work like it did in books. After school Sally says she "got to be an adult, which was fantastic." She worked in a Red Cross hospital in Japan and travelled around Australia and New Zealand before returning to study for a degree in Philosophy and Literature. Panicking when she realised, in her third year, that she needed to earn a living, Sally enrolled in a Masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University where she wrote her first novel, Ways to Live Forever. This remarkable debut novel won the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize 2008 in the UK, the highly prestigious Luchs prize in Germany, and led to Sally being named the overall Glen Dimplex New Writer of the Year 2008, in Ireland. Sally, aged 25, is now living in a flat in London, writing stories and trying to believe her luck!