Other Carrie Ryans, crazy-coincidences, and books

As it turns out, there are several Carrie Ryans out there and unsurprisingly I'll sometimes get an email intended for one of them.  Sometimes it's spam in which case I just delete it, sometimes I'll have been accidentally signed up for something (Dear Carrie Ryan who joined Match.com -- I have your matches... email me and I'll move the account over to you :), but more often than not, the email is something important.  In those cases, I'll respond to the person to let them know that I'm not the Carrie Ryan they're looking for.

(and whenever I do that, I always say to myself, "These aren't the droids you're looking for")

So yesterday I get an email for a different Carrie Ryan and I let them know they have the wrong one.  They apologize and thank me -- standard stuff.  I didn't really think much about the fact that my signature on my emails lists my books.

But then I got another email from them.  Turns out, the sender's niece just happened to know who I was because she'd recently read my book.  How crazy is that?!  Of course I'm thinking it was The Forest of Hands and Teeth since that's the one most people are familiar with.  

Nope!  Turns out she'd recently read The Map to Everywhere, the middle grade fantasy adventure that I wrote with my husband that doesn't come out until November.  As far as I know, ARCs have just started going out and so far we haven't really heard back from anyone who has read it.  And I have to admit, knowing that ARCs are out there, that people are going to start reading this book that I love so much... it's terrifying!  Like, nail-bitingly stressful waiting for that first response.

Thankfully, she loved it!  I can't even begin to tell you how much that made my (and JP's) day!  Our week!!  But what really blows my mind and what I love so much about all of this, is that the first "in the wild" feedback we've gotten for Map came from the niece of a person who just happened to email the wrong Carrie Ryan about something important.

It's the kind of thing that if you put it in a book, no one would believe you!  It actually reminded me of the time my mom lent her ARC of Forest to her friend who took it on a flight and ended up sitting next to Vania Stoyanova -- a friend of mine from the book world.  This was months before Forest came out and when my mom's friend pulled it out, Vania was like, "Hey! I know that book! I've been wanting to read it!"

Here are these two random strangers sitting next to each other on a plane and they both have something in common: me.  Which they'd never have figured out if one of them hadn't happened to have one of the few advanced copies of Forest that existed at the time.

It makes me wonder, how often does stuff like that happen and we miss it?  How often are we surrounded by all these tiny, co-incidental connections that we have no idea about?  If anything, it makes you realize just how small this world really is.

And it makes me so crazy thankful that someone emailed the wrong Carrie Ryan yesterday and that I responded to let them know :)