A good match

Lauren Emma Holbrook is a busy young woman. She works for her best friend, who owns the studio where she is a photographer. She lives with her widowed father and keeps up with her two married sisters and their growing families. She leads a Bible class for teenage girls; is completely addicted to coffee and chocolate; is active in her church and in a singles Bible study group.

And she's probably the busiest matchmaker since Yente the Matchmaker in "Fiddler on the Roof."

Lauren is the creation of Erynn Mangum, daughter of Susan Terry Mangum and granddaughter of Cape Girardeans Bill and Eloise Terry.

Erynn Mangum introduced Lauren with "Miss Match," and has recently published "Rematch." She is hard at work on the last of the three-part series, "Match Point," due out sometime in June, 2008.

In "Miss Match," we meet Lauren, who claims to be a confirmed single woman but who has a talent for matching people who might not have otherwise noticed each other. Readers are offered a glimpse of her life as she relates to her employer, who is also her lifelong best friend, but is he also more than just a friend? Readers watch Lauren struggle with how her Scripture studies relate to her own life. Heady from the success of matching her sister with a husband, Lauren sets out to connect the pastor of her singles Bible study group with a co-worker and other singles she believes are meant for each other. The characters Mangum creates in the book weave in her message of God's sovereignty in "Miss Match," and trust in God in "Rematch," when her father contemplates a match of his own, one that she didn't try to set up.

Mangum, 22, is single and an intern with Christ Church in Albuquerque, N.M., where she lives at home with her parents. At her internship she leads a group of teenage girls. Sounds familiar enough to make the series seem autobiographical.

"Part of it is," Mangum said. "The whole coffee addiction is definitely mine. There are a lot of similarities, but I have never been very successful at matchmaking. I've tried, but it never worked out very well."

Mangum took a correspondence course through the Christian Writers Guild in her senior year of high school and two years after that. Relying on the tried and true advice to writers -- write what you know about -- she considered a couple from her church who, to their friends' amazement, got married.

"The guy led the singles Bible study and she was a girl he had known forever," Mangum said. "Before they got engaged or even announced they were interested in each other, we all were wishing they would get together because they were perfect for each other. I was thinking that would be such a fun book to write, a girl who has a gift from God of matchmaking."

Both books are fun to read. They are geared toward young women age 16 to early twenties, but Mangum said some of the fifth- and sixth-graders in her church enjoyed the books, and she has received e-mails from more mature women who said they liked them as well.

"What I want readers to take away -- I just want them to be able to smile and come away with a deeper understanding of the love of God," Mangum said.

She said she would encourage any aspiring writer to go for it.

"If you are talented and it's something you love to do, by all means pursue it with everything you have," she said. "I don't believe God gives talents and does not expect them to be used."

lredeffer@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 160