The Shunning

For this post, I was going to pick up an earlier swap called Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert but I decided to spare you guys the witches for a while.  Really, though, it is in fact the season of the witch and no better time to fill your quiet time with thoughts of enchantment and castles in the sky!  So let's see if we can fit that one in soon.  In the meantime, it's onward with my very first Christian fiction pick The Shunning: The Heritage of Lancaster County, #1 from a trilogy by Beverly Lewis.

Amish teenager Katie is one of the more headstrong, passionate women of her family.  She lives a normal female Amish life with her loving, close-knit parents and brothers in Hickory Hollow, taking care of her people, the house and preparing for the next great step in her life - marrying Bishop John, a 40-year-old widower with ready-made children of his own to be cared for.  Katie knows she should be grateful.  But she can't help but dream of her first love and loss, Dan Fisher, who taught her to play the guitar and sing songs she would never hear in church (gasp!).  Katie struggles with the constant longing for something else in life - and that something else includes music, guitars, boys ... and a family secret she discovers in the attic one day, in search of her mother's wedding dress.  What is this secret, and will it bring Katie closer to the life she has always dreamed of?  Will it tear her family apart and destoy every semblance of peace in the community of Hickory Hollow?

This book was alright.  I really kept reading because of the author's firsthand knowledge of Amish life.  Lewis describes the daily lives of typical "Plain" families, except not all Plain families can be described as "typical' - and this is where my problem comes in.  Katie has been depressed ever since she lost her boyfriend who drowned, on a fishing trip I believe, and she still longs for the English ways he taught her to appreciate - catchy music, bible discussion (as if the bible were up for discussion on the Plain!) and the fancy things that she will never get to experience herself.  How Dan Fisher ever came to these realizations himself is never explained.  So I wonder how Katie can yearn so deeply for something that neither she nor Dan as Plain people should be familiar with.  That and the fact that Dan's past was never really discussed in detail took away from the novel, in my opinion.  He is such a part of Katie's life, although absent, that I wish we had at least an inkling of who he was in order to understand his impact on Katie's life - and also to understand how the Plain people dealt with Dan and his bible-questioning ways.  Unfortunately, this becomes the whole novel and I'm sorry to say I won't be reading further in this series, although I hear Lewis' Abraham's daughters series is very good so I may pick the first one up at some point.