I don’t tend to read a lot of e-books. I’m kind of a paper book snob, so digital books are never my first choice. But every now and then I get a new e-book, and they’re great for travel, especially. When I recently went to visit family, I decided it was a good time to finish a series I’ve read slowly over the last few years, A Katie Parker Production by Jenny B. Jones.
The first book, In Between, introduces Katie Parker, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a drug addict who has been shuffled around the foster system and has put up major defensive walls in the process. She gets placed in the home of James and Millie Scott, a pastor and his wife in the small town of In Between, Texas. But she is interested in none of it – not their love, not their small town charm, and certainly not their God.
But the further Katie runs from all that the Scotts offer her, the more trouble she finds herself in. Until finally, she has to make a choice about what she wants her life to look like.
The strength of this six-book series is in its heart and its characters. Katie is an intriguing main character. Her history and its resulting trauma make her a very different person from me, but I never felt disconnected from her, at least in the first few books. James and Millie, her foster parents, are lovely people who live out their faith in actions. They put off warmth and stability in every interaction, something Katie is not accustomed to.
And then there’s Maxine. Millie’s mother, she’s popularly known as Mad Maxine and takes her job as Katie’s foster grandmother very seriously. If seriously means pulling Katie into every hair-brained scheme she comes up with. And there are many schemes, usually involving semi-well intentioned trespassing and a tandem bicycle called Ginger Rogers.
I really
enjoyed the first three books in this series. The last three, though, feel very different. Book 4, Something to Believe In, is very odd in that it was actually published 6 years after Book 5, Can’t Let You Go. And then Book 6, Forever Your Girl, was published after that. When read in order, #4 feels much the same as the previous books, and it’s an enjoyable read. But apparently it was written as a correction, because a lot of readers didn’t like the multi-year gap between Book 3 and what then became Book 5. There are just a lot of inconsistencies created that make the last two books frustrating. And their tone is just very different from the earlier books. They feel older, which makes sense as Katie is now in her mid-twenties, and they feel a lot more intense. It was just a lot of tonal whiplash that was hard for me to roll with easily. I enjoyed the ending of the last book, but the journey to get there was challenging.
Overall, I think there are a lot of good things about this series. I enjoyed most of it, and the lessons it holds dig deep. The inconsistencies just gave me more of a sour taste.