Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Summer Promise | 1988 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 2 | A Whisper and a Wish | 1989 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 3 | Yours Forever | 1990 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 4 | Surprise Endings | 1990 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 5 | Island Dreamer | 1992 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 6 | A Heart Full of Hope | 1992 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 7 | True Friends | 1992 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 8 | Starry Night | 1993 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 9 | Seventeen Wishes | 1993 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 10 | A Time to Cherish | 1994 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 11 | Sweet Dreams | 1994 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 12 | A Promise Is Forever | 1994 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 13 | Departures | 1999 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
| 14 | From the Secret Place in My Heart | 1999 | Robin Jones Gunn | Buy |
Summer Promise (1988) introduces Christy Miller, a fourteen-year-old spending summer with her aunt and uncle in Newport Beach, California. She meets Todd Spencer on the beach, and that meeting sets the course for the next fourteen books. Robin Jones Gunn’s series follows Christy through high school, covering the usual territory, friendships, first love, family conflict, identity, but from an explicitly Christian perspective.
The series was a phenomenon in Christian YA fiction. Gunn writes teenage emotions with genuine warmth and doesn’t reduce everything to simple moral lessons. Christy makes mistakes, questions her faith, and grows up gradually across the books. The fourteen volumes, published from 1988 to 1999, launched three sequel series that followed Christy through college, marriage, and parenthood, making her one of the longest-running characters in Christian fiction.