I wrote a meaningful review of Christy and Todd, The College Years (which I just finished), on Goodreads, and now I think I'd like to post it here. It speaks to a lot of the things I've been processing through lately.

When I think back to fifteen years ago, when I read the Christy Miller teen years series for the first time, I seem to recall identifying with Christy and enjoying the fact thoroughly. A month or two ago, as I began the college series, my overall expectation was that I would no longer identify with the characters as much, since I've ben through a lot more of life, and Christian fiction tends to flatten characters by making them act too "perfectly" when life hits them hard. So, all in all, I wasn't expecting much from these books, although I wasn't expecting to hate them. I simply wanted to finish the series to gain a sense of completeness, of a finished task.

So imagine my surprise when I found that God had some small lessons in mind for me as I read the books. Contrary to what I expected, instead of disliking the book because of Christy's close to "perfect" responses to life hazards, I began to see her more as, I suppose you could say, a role model. What made this really evident to me was the surprising renewed revelation that Christy's shortcomings are extremely similar to mine--but she handles them much, much better than I do. And for the first time I read these books in such a way that, instead of glorying in the fact that she has all the same problems I do, I was gently challenged to start to mature out of my shortcomings as Christy does. I want to trust God more, worry less, and, above all, not wallow in my failures, but try to grow out of them. That last bit went especially deep.

I feel like I read these books at just the right time. More than just the fact that I am very close to Christy's age and stage in life in this series, I feel that this was the right time in my walk with God for me to read these books. I was completely not expecting it, but God used them to show me some quiet truths He's been conveying to me little by little.

-Stephanie

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