A promise broken. A secret betrayed. What do you believe?

When I first got the idea for Pure, I was working as an  editorial assistant in New York, and reading a lot of YA fiction. Almost  everything I read left me thinking, “Hmmm… this really wasn’t at all  like my own high school experience.”  Though my friends and I never had  extreme fantasy lives (or extremely traumatic problems), the everyday stuff was definitely dramatic enough. 

When I also saw a statistic in a newspaper clipping that said a surprisingly high number of high school students were affiliated with a religious group of some kind, another spark lit up in me. My faith and being involved in my church youth group were both very important to me in my teen years, but that also came with its own set of struggles. So I thought to myself, "Where's the book for that kid?"  Read more about that here. 

So I decided to try to write something myself: something that captured the whirlwind rollercoaster of  “normal,” while also trying to be dedicated to your faith. One that focused on the deliciously horrible time in life when, for the first time, you’re making choices that separate you from your friends, your parents, your teachers and mentors—when you begin defining yourself as an individual.

I wasn’t very successful with this right away. In fact it took another year and a half of scribbling and scrabbling and moving away from New York to Atlanta before things really gelled. Knowing I was working on this type of project, my editor friend showed me an article about purity  rings. Immediately my interest was sparked.

I knew a book about purity rings couldn’t simply be about whether or not someone broke  her promise, but what happened to her normal life afterwards once she did. What would it be like if your whole social and moral framework suddenly got  broken apart?  How would you decide what was right? Whose side would you be on? How would that affect other decisions you made?  And suddenly I  had my story—a story about forming your own morality, and how hard that  is to do in the midst of all the life pressures we face.

It took another year and a half of working on and off to finally finish what is now Pure.  I hope, while you’re reading it, you think about your own promises and why you make them, but mainly I hope you just enjoy the book. I’ll look  forward to your comments!