As a kid, historical fiction books were everywhere. I read American Girls, The American Adventure series, and Childhood of Famous Americans. But once I became a teenager, it felt like all the good books disappeared.

One day, I noticed my mother clearing old books off our shelves, and I asked about one of the books I saw. She had never read it, but it belonged to my great-grandmother. It was Christian fiction, set in Biblical times but not with Biblical characters. I thought it sounded interesting, and it was. I stayed up late reading. Then my eyes widened, and my heart sped up. This is inappropriate, I thought. But I was too engrossed to stop.

I spent a week going through the trilogy. Several times I stopped, convicted against reading more, but the story kept pulling me back. I had to know what happened. I started hiding the book so my family wouldn’t see, although no one knew what it was about anyway. I felt God prompting me to put it away for good, but I couldn’t get the story out of my head.

I skipped many portions of the book, feeling it was too sensual and inappropriate. Yet the parts I did read left me feeling ashamed. I began to view romance differently, even the people around me differently. I was determined never to read a romance book like that again, even if the author were a Christian or an excellent writer. I turned to Christian book lists, hoping to find something good there, but everything contained the same kind of romance I wanted to avoid. I scoured the list for anything that didn’t mention romance, and even those unfortunately went down the same path.