Lizzie the Librarian Reads Literature

One of my reading goals this year is to re-read some old favorites and see if they still hit the way they once did. I'm looking at the last twelve years and selecting my top book of the year for each, which means that I'll be re-reading one per month for all of 2025.  Starting with January, I got to revisit what used to be my favorite romance novel of all time and my top book of 2013. It still stands up, though maybe not to the extent that some of my new favorites do. I read Blackmoore by Julianne Donaldson for the first time when I was seventeen and at the time it changed me. I have written in a previous post about how I grew up incredibly conservative and I wasn't allowed to read romance novels that weren't Christian for my entire adolescence; trust me when I say, Christian romance is a genre to stay far away from. Now, that isn't to say that I never read books with romance in them, just never the classic romance novels you think of when it comes to the genre. Tha...

I grew up in Fundamentalist, Evangelical Christianity. I was homeschooled by my parents, I went to church every Sunday, youth group two times a week, and attended Christian college. I didn't have any friends who weren't the same religion as me and I lived my life in constant fear that I wasn't living up to the expectations my parents, the church, and even God had for me. When I questioned things I'd been taught or failed to read my Bible regularly, the guilt ate at me and I was convinced I was going to hell and had never truly been a Christian. I used to pray every night on a loop for God to save me from hell and keep my family safe.  When I went to college, even though it was a Christian one, it was the first time I lived away from my parents. Even though I was still being taught the same damaging things I always had been, it was coming from different sources and I was able to parse through everything myself without the influence of parents, older siblings, and youth p...