I am so excited to be doing a book review for ya’ll! It’s been awhile since we’ve paid a visit to my bookshelf and I’m really excited to bring you guys a new book from my favorite Amish-life author. Cindy first came across my bookshelf a couple years ago with the Amish Vines and Vineyards series which is the reason why I started reading Amish books in the first place. It never seemed like anything I would love but I did!! When the series was done I had some serious sadness and withdrawl issues. But Ms Woodsmall is back with what is going to be another amazing series; and I was lucky enough to check out the first two books.
Twenty-year-old Ariana Brenneman loves her family and the Old Ways. She has two aspirations: open a café in historic Summer Grove to help support her family’s ever-expanding brood and to keep any other Amish from being lured into the Englisch life by Quill Schlabach.
Five years ago Quill, along with her dear friend Frieda, ran off together, and Ariana still carries the wounds of that betrayal. When she unexpectedly encounters him, she soon realizes he has plans to help someone else she loves leave the Amish.
Despite how things look, Quill’s goal has always been to protect Ariana from anything that may hurt her, including the reasons he left. After returning to Summer Grove on another matter, he unearths secrets about Ariana and her family that she is unaware of. His love and loyalty to her beckons him to try to win her trust and help her find a way to buy the café—because when she learns the truth that connects her and a stranger named Skylar Nash, Quill knows it may upend her life forever.
The Old Order Amish life Ariana Brenneman loved vanished virtually overnight with the discovery that she was switched at birth twenty years ago. Now she’s immersed in the Englischer world, getting to know her mother and under the authority of her biological father, an atheist intellectual with resolute plans to expand Ariana’s worldview. Only Quill Schlabach, a childhood friend
living Englisch, can help steady Ariana’s tilting ground between the two worlds, but can she trust him after so many betrayals?
At the same time, Skylar Nash is forced to choose rehab or spend several months with her true relatives, the large Brenneman family and their seemingly backward life—no electricity, no technology, no fun. What the young woman can’t leave behind is her addiction to illegal prescription drugs and deep emptiness from the belief that she doesn’t belong in either family.
New ties are binding Ariana and Skylar to the lives they were meant to have. Can they find the wisdom and strength they’ll need to follow God’s threads into unexpected futures?
Cindy’s books are an easy and enjoyable read, but don’t mistake that for simple or something that isn’t complex. The relationships are hard, and the reality of what these people are dealing with his powerful and very, very real. People might get angry at the way some of the characters behave, I know I did, but you have to understand the reality of the world these characters live in. It’s a very real world. Looking at these books as not only an enjoyable read but as an education as well is important. These books are an education for its readers, and Ms Woodsmall expertly does so.
have you read any Amish fiction? I’d love hear about it!!
And one lucky reader will win their own copies of books 1 and 2 of this series!!
~Rheanna
