AUTHOR: KATHLEEN FULLER
When real life isn’t as ideal as the picture painted in letters, can two young people set aside the images they created and learn to love each other’s true selves? Jalon Chupp has a past he isn’t proud to claim. He’s worked hard to overcome his youthful mistakes, and he has recommitted himself to his faith. As he sees other members of his close-knit Amish community marry and start families, he thinks he may be ready to follow that same path. Remembering a girl he grew up with, Phoebe Bontrager, who moved to Indiana a few years ago, he writes her a letter, striking up a pen pal relationship. But when he invites her to visit him in Birch Creek, Ohio, she resists. Phoebe has kept her relationship with Jalon a secret, knowing her parents wouldn’t approve of the man with a troubled past. When her mother plays matchmaker, Phoebe sneaks away to Birch Creek and stays with her older brother Asa and his new wife, Abigail. As Phoebe and Jalon spend more time together, they discover they have misrepresented themselves in their letters and begin to worry that maybe their relationship was not meant to be. In order to reach past the perfect images they created in their letters, both Phoebe and Jalon must put their faith in something—or Someone—bigger than either of them could imagine.