Heather Fitch and Melinda Overstreet are nothing like my wife. I think, if anything, they are conglomerations of all the girls I wished I could date back in school but never had the nerve to ask out. The real-life girls probably weren’t as together as Heather and Melinda, but in my young, immature mind, I didn’t realize that. “Gosh! She looks perfect so surely she is!!”
So, if there’s a maturity in my thinking that comes out in the books, Sonya Kiel (in A Star Falls on Oklahoma) is probably in a line with Heather in Melinda in that she looks perfect, but hopefully is a little more realistic with her flaws. But she’s also a fantasy in that I see these young starlets and “influencers” in the news that are certainly outwardly pretty, but as I read about their constant break-ups and melt-downs, I can’t help but think that, in the long run, they would have been better off—especially spiritually—to have never been “discovered” and stayed in their small town somewhere, involved in a local church, etc. But I can see where, if you’re 22 years old and the world is throwing millions of dollars and lots of adoration at you, it would be nigh-impossible to turn that down.
Then, the secondary problem within this is all the young people who are being influenced by these influencers and thinking that’s the way their life should be. Of course, it’s all portrayed in the media as so fun and glamorous (even the pics of some 40-something star stumbling drunk out of a bachelor party), which just adds to the problem. I have no idea what to do about the problem in a world-wide sense … short of another flood, but we know that’s not going to happen. Though, personally, I haven’t seen a rainbow since last summer.
