69 Books Like Christy Miller Collection, Vol 1

I absolutely devoured this book in just a few hours. 

This Christian family drama crosses over into mystery/suspense. In a family with three sisters and one brother, no one seems to be able to get it all together. One sister is a writer, but she’s being blackmailed for what she’s writing about. The other sister is notorious for one-night stands, the third sister is mostly stable with a husband and two kids.

Their brother? He’s going through a divorce. Only problem is that when he went to visit his soon-to-be ex-wife, he found her dead. With a shared son and a dying mother-in-law, who should have custody over the child? It seemed simple until the brother was listed as a person of interest for his wife’s death. The sisters all put on their detective hats to help their brother out.

I laughed at the sibling rivalry in this book and… show more.

I love a good family drama where there’s a found family.

A young reporter is assigned to write the obituary of an alive woman, Mrs. Kip. Mrs. Kip lost her husband, never remarried, and never had children. But she lived what could appear to be a thousand lives as she held different roles and careers throughout her life.

In order for one job/role/calling to end, a part of her had to die. Now, faced with a young blonde who favors her, Mrs. Kip feels as though maybe this is the daughter she never had, the daughter who would listen to the stories, the daughter that might not be family by blood, but family by heart.

This story gave me a lot of “spread the Gospel” vibes, but also reminded me to not sleep on the seniors in our lives. They have a lot to offer, too. 

This book made me feel like I was eating Southern biscuits and gravy, but there weren’t seconds! I wanted more!

A death changes the world of this entire family, but told through the lens of four sisters, we see how complicated all families can really be.

One sister struggles with her marriage, another struggles with being single, the youngest, unsure of her next career move, and another has secrets too painful to share. With a grudge-holding brother and mom who are also grieving, the family must look to God for healing and redemption.

I felt the love and warmth on every page, and couldn’t stop reading it. Finding faith and love is the crux of this entire Christian family drama novel, and you won’t finish it with dry eyes. I sure didn’t!

This Christian fiction novel holds a special place in my heart because I didn’t really know who Melody Carlson wrote this book for.

Christy Miller was written for teens and young adults. Where Yesterday Lives was written for Young Adults. But what Christian family drama has characters that are 16, 37, and 72?! Okay, maybe grandma is 71, but the point of the matter is that it’s told from multiple POVs across three different generations.

As of writing this, I’m 28 and I loved it. Why? It’s about a family. A true-to-life family, with true-to-life problems. Girls get taken out of school and pulled away from their boyfriends in real life. Sometimes moms and dads get divorced. And sadly, sometimes grandma or grandpa may start forgetting things they should remember.

This story made me laugh, cry, and feel so grateful that even in our mess, God still loves us. If… show more.

Building your own sailboat from scratch, then sailing it from California down to Baja, camping, and surfing along the way: how can that not be a cool story? Christian Beamish manages the perfect blend of introspection and backstory with descriptions of sea, sky, land, and the people he meets along the way.

While most of us won’t suddenly move from being homeschooled in an African village to attending a huge high school in California, readers can learn so much from Katie!

If you love books that emphasize strong families and congenial characters who face relevant issues, you’ll love Faith Under Pressure.

I was inspired by the respect within Katie’s family, her desire to bloom where she’s planted, and her commitment to start a Christian club at school.

When agreeing to tutor a bully threatens her new friendships, Katie faces a new level of anxiety, and her faith will be tested like never before. 

The Dawn Patrol is the first in Winslow’s Boone Daniels detective series. It has many hallmarks of a Winslow novel: a Southern California backdrop (San Diego), a host of morally ambiguous characters, a generally good guy trying to do what’s right, snappy writing, and surfing. This book also presents a surf culture we’ve come to recognize from television and movies, with a language, that while not universally shared by all surfers, is understood as the sport’s lingua franca—dude, gnarly, epic, wipeout. Where this book excels, however, is in capturing surfing’s dualistic nature as both a solitary pursuit and a place of a tight-knit community. Main character Boone Daniels is both the lone wolf and a member of a pack, one that can both have his back in the lineup and turn on him on dry land.

Mitali Perkins is a winsome, thoughtful writer who easily draws the reader into her discussions of the timelessness of each classic book. This book is a blend of memoir, literary criticism, and moral formation. My favorite part of Steeped in Stories was her contagious love for each book. She reminded me why I loved them, and why I wanted my children to read them when they were younger. Not only does Mitali guide the reader through what makes these books classics in a good sense, she also helps us see them with discerning eyes so that instead of ditching old books for problematic parts, she helps us navigate them with young readers in mind. Steeped in Stories discusses The Hobbit, Heidi, Emily of Deep Valley, Little Women, and The Silver Chair. 

This has to be the coolest story of reinvention – man gets unexpectedly dumped by his wife, moves to a California beach town, rescues a 140-lb neglected Newfoundland, and teaches him how to surf with him on his longboard. Man and dog are both traumatized, and the scenes of their slow dance around one another in a tiny apartment are so sweet and awkward, like the slapstick 80’s sitcoms I grew up watching. I love stories like this that make me believe in fate, that Colin and his dog George were destined to give each other a second chance. When they start winning dog surf competitions, I was cheering out loud. It’s quirky, brilliant, and badass all wrapped in one. 

I read The Brick People when it was first published in 1988.

At the time, I was already familiar with Morales’ work, but this historical novel about the Simons Brick Factory in Southern California and the Mexican migrants who the Simons brother depended upon for their success seized my imagination.

The author blends folklore, history, myth, and magical realism into a novel that relates the story of Mexican migrants and their complicity with or rebellion against the Simons brothers and the mores of the early 20th Century Los Angeles region.

Morales shows how history from the ground up is manifested in people’s lives.  His characters work and play hard as they seek to build community and pursue dreams of social mobility even when customs and laws prohibit them.