I’ve always been drawn to realistic stories of moral dilemmas, hidden secrets, and unexpected twists. To do that in my novels, I draw from real-life experiences. I enjoy researching all my book locations and situations—everything from Amish special needs schools to Amish camel farms. Striving to be as authentic as possible, I spend time with my Amish friends, so the problems my characters face often are based on real-life events they’ve faced, and I have an Amish reader who checks the novels accuracy as I strive to write life-changing, heart-tugging novels of faith, hope, and forgiveness.
Although I’m not convinced Old Order Amish women actually would venture out this way, I liked that the female characters made the tough decision to leave their community because of abuse and violence to start the new community of Promise Lodge.
The story delves into some of the hidden problems some Amish women have to deal with and exposes the dark secrets characters are hiding. Second chances, forgiveness, and fresh starts are all themes close to my heart, and I found the interesting, strong characters combined with their trust, faith, and community relationships made for a compelling story.
"Hubbard writes Amish stories with style and grace." --RT Book Reviews
It's a better life, a fresh start--and a heaven-sent second chance. Founded by three Amish sisters determined to put misfortune behind them, Promise Lodge is a colony where faith's abiding promise can be fulfilled--and love can make all things new…
Energetic widow Mattie Bender Schwartz is working day and night to get Promise Lodge going. She's also hoping the change will help her son Noah's heart to heal after his broken engagement. But his former fiancée, Deborah, is looking for a fresh start too. Filled with regret, and cast…
I’ve visited Amish communities for years as a tourist. An agent suggested I write it because of my faith in God. The Amish base their lifestyle and traditions on their faith in God, and she felt the books would be more authentic if the author felt the same. I’ve never been Amish, but the topic is fun to research, and some of the Amish are forthcoming in helping me. I love the fried chicken, homemade butterscotch pie, corn pudding, and beautiful quilts they have available when visiting the different Ohio and Indiana communities. They are not my typical audience.
This is a fun book with a matchmaker and nanny needing a job. Hannah is the main character, and she has been heartbroken by the man asking for her help. She takes the job and sets out to find his match, but while she’s looking, surprises happen!
After Hannah Miller loses her dream job, becoming a nanny—and matchmaker—for widower Jake Burkholder is her only option. Finding Jake a wife is her hardest assignment yet. After all, he once broke Hannah’s heart when he married her best friend. But as long-held secrets are revealed, Hannah can’t help but wish she could be Jake’s perfect match…
From Love Inspired: Uplifting stories of faith, forgiveness and hope.
I’ve visited Amish communities for years as a tourist. An agent suggested I write it because of my faith in God. The Amish base their lifestyle and traditions on their faith in God, and she felt the books would be more authentic if the author felt the same. I’ve never been Amish, but the topic is fun to research, and some of the Amish are forthcoming in helping me. I love the fried chicken, homemade butterscotch pie, corn pudding, and beautiful quilts they have available when visiting the different Ohio and Indiana communities. They are not my typical audience.
Rachel keeps us guessing how this couple will ever get together. She makes you gasp and laugh! Her characters really come alive in her books. You won’t put her book down until you absolutely have to because you’ll want to finish it in one sitting! You’ll also learn how arranged marriages work.
In Rachel J. Good’s sweetly romantic inspirational series, a bustling Green Valley Farmer’s Market in Pennsylvania is the perfect place for residents of nearby Amish communities to find the partner of their dreams—when, and how, they least expect it! Will appeal to fans of Charlotte Hubbard, Amy Lillard, and Jennifer Beckstrand.
When widower Stephen Lapp moves his five children from New York State to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, his only plan is to buy his family’s farm stand, Lapp’s Pastured Pork. That way, his brother can move closer to his fiancée and open his own stand. But on Stephen’s first trip…
I am a french writer, I like to write satires and tongue-in-cheek books about society. Work, children, France, social classes... When you find the right angle almost everything can be funny. With my writing I want to entertain, but give the reader something to think about. I hope this list will make you laugh as much I did.
A. J. Jacobs, a journalist, decides to read the Bible and try to follow it literally for a whole year, to the point of eating locusts, throwing small pebbles at couples he suspects of adultery, slaying idolatry, and speaking the naked truth… Struggling to follow archaic rules, he lives a disconcerting experience under the perplexed eyes of his family and becomes quickly out of step with the present time. The Year of Living Biblically depicts a clash of worlds with a caustic humor and I’ve burst out laughing a couple of times. I recommend it to believers and non-believers, both will be amused by this witty book that gives us food for thought.
From the bestselling author of The Know-It-All comes a fascinating and timely exploration of religion and the Bible.
Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers.
I became a mother while a graduate student. Bombarded by societal expectations and advice on pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, I quickly combined this life experience with my scholarly interests and wrote a dissertation on Christian women and childbirth. I later began to explore expressions of religion and spirituality outside of traditional religion – a topic that found expression in my book Sacred Pregnancy. I am a professor of American Studies and Religion at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD and have a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Blessed Events started me on my journey to study birth and religious and spiritual meaning making.
In this book, Klassen uses an ethnographic approach to interview a wide spectrum of women who have chosen home birth and understand the act in religious terms. Placing these intimate portraits of women from a variety of religious and spiritual perspectives in the context of religious and medical theory and history, Klassen makes a strong case for birth as a site for religious and spiritual experience.
Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a religious act. Most American women who have…
I’ve always been drawn to realistic stories of moral dilemmas, hidden secrets, and unexpected twists. To do that in my novels, I draw from real-life experiences. I enjoy researching all my book locations and situations—everything from Amish special needs schools to Amish camel farms. Striving to be as authentic as possible, I spend time with my Amish friends, so the problems my characters face often are based on real-life events they’ve faced, and I have an Amish reader who checks the novels accuracy as I strive to write life-changing, heart-tugging novels of faith, hope, and forgiveness.
Told by an outsider, lawyer Ellie Hathaway, who left the Amish community years ago, Picoult immerses us in a stunning and heartbreaking story of a young Amish girl accused of murdering her newborn.
I admire the amount of research Picoult did to stay true to many of the Amish traditions, but she also spins a mesmerizing tale that captivated me emotionally and provided many twists and turns, including an unexpected and shocking reveal at the end. The story left many haunting moral questions that lingered long after I finished the book.
From the bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper comes the riveting story of a murder that shatters the picturesque calm of Amish country -- and tests the heart and soul of the lawyer defending the woman at the center of the storm.
The discovery of a dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. But the police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial evidence suggests that eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life. When Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned big-city attorney, comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania,…
I was born and raised in Kansas and will forever have a soft spot in my heart for golden wheat fields, sunflower-filled ditches, and sunsets that explode colors on the horizon. I always knew I’d write a book set in Kansas, and I’d explore my long Mennonite linage and its seemingly unrealistic theology. Pacifism is a beautiful concept until you’re faced with protecting the people you love. As I grew older, I became more curious about larger, practical questions. It’s one thing to be a conscientious objector to war. It’s another thing to confront the cosmically dark evil of your neighbor. From that, Never Enough Flamingos was born.
Full confession here. I’m not a big romance reader and so I’m baffled by why Mennonite/Amish mystery romances are such a huge genre. Maybe it’s the perceived simplicity and innocence of the sect? Maybe they take people back to a time they never experienced themselves? That’s why I found Weaver-Zercher’s book helpful in clarifying why so many people love these books. Her writing is witty and engaging and kept me reading even though the subject itself is on the academic side. If you do want to explore the genre, the best source for a recommendation is the podcast Just Plain Wrong where three Mennonite librarians irreverently dissect Mennonite romances on a weekly basis.
Browse the inspirational fiction section of your local bookstore, and you will likely find cover after cover depicting virtuous young women cloaked in modest dresses and wearing a pensive or playful expression. They hover innocently above sun-drenched pastures or rustic country lanes, often with a horse-drawn buggy in the background-or the occasional brawny stranger. Romance novels with Amish protagonists, such as the best-selling trailblazer "The Shunning" by Beverly Lewis, are becoming increasingly popular with a largely evangelical female audience. "Thrill of the Chaste" is the first book to analyze this growing trend in romance fiction and to place it into…
Life is busy. We all feel it. As my husband and I have built businesses, published books, traveled the country, and homeschooled our four kids, we’ve worried at times that our schedule is too packed and we’re losing sight of what matters. Seven years ago, we took time to write out a “Family Values List,” which has guided our family’s trajectory. We measure every decision and opportunity up against our core values. This provides a depth of intentionality in our parenting, which has led us to read (and write!) resources around how to make the most of the time we have together as a family. “Do life together” is on our values list, and it’s what we aim to do each day.
Parenting with intentionality necessitates a certain degree of extremism. It takes a lot of effort to do things differently from the society around us. In Almost Amish, we gain a glimpse into Amish communities and why they do what they do. We’re not challenged to overhaul our lives and do as the Amish do, but rather to consider the heart and purpose behind their ways of life and how we can implement some of those principles to strengthen family ties and purposefully raise our kids. My main takeaway from this book was the importance of slowing down and enjoying my kids — not making them the center of my world, but rather doing life alongside them in a meaningful and fun way.
Have you ever stopped to think, Maybe the Amish are on to something? Look around. We tweet while we drive, we talk while we text, and we surf the Internet until we fall asleep. We are essentially plugged in and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Rather than mastering technology, we have allowed technology to master us. We are an exhausted nation. No one has enough time, everyone feels stressed out, and our kids spend more hours staring at a screen each week than they do playing outside.
Born in 1969 as the seventh of eight children to two Harlem-raised parents, I benefited from both the inner-city life of Queens, New York and childhood summers spent on a farm in rural upstate New York. Academic, professional, and physical accomplishments have punctuated my life. An adventurer by nature, I became the first African American to hike to the top of every mountain in the northeast US over 4,000' (115 of them) by September of 2000. At that time, less than 400 people had accomplished this feat; whereas thousands have scaled Mount Everest. My home city’s iconic landmarks create a psychological veil that blinds people to the vast open spaces that dominate New York State.
I first saw Amish people in New York during the mid-1970s while spending summers on my family’s abandoned dairy farm in St. Lawrence County. We (Jeffersons) arrived in 1972, and a Swartzentruber Amish community settled nearby in 1974. Although we overlapped with our simply living county neighbors for ten summers (my parents sold our farm in 1985), I knew very little about them. This book provides readers with a college-level education on the inception, migration, internal conflicts, socioeconomic and sociopolitical lives of the Amish.
In a book that highlights the existence and diversity of Amish communities in New York State, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner draws on twenty-five years of observation, participation, interviews, and archival research to emphasize the contribution of the Amish to the state's rich cultural heritage. While the Amish settlements in Pennsylvania and Ohio are internationally known, the Amish population in New York, the result of internal migration from those more established settlements, is more fragmentary and less visible to all but their nearest non-Amish neighbors. All of the Amish currently living in New York are post-World War II migrants from points to…
When I had my twin boys 29 years ago, I started reading every parenting book I could. I was shocked at what I felt was really bad advice. It was permissive, indulgent, and lacked instilling virtues. It was then that I birthed the idea of writing parenting books with traditional Christian principles. Since then, I’ve spent the last 28 years learning all I could about raising well-behaved children. I also have done much research on the harmful effects of screen time on children. Other works include Rubric Rules: A Cleaning System for Kids and The Parenting with Focus Video Course.
Serena Miller is one of my favorite fiction writers. However, once when researching to write a novel based on the Amish, she couldn’t help notice that the Amish had the happiest, nicest children she had ever seen. So, she changed from writing a fictional novel to writing a book about how the Amish parent.
I recommend this book because it reminds you that your children don’t need video games, smartphones, or tablets to entertain themselves. The Amish children can easily, happily entertain themselves with very few simple toys. And they know how to cook and do practical skills as small children. Great inspiration.
In the tradition of Bringing Up Bebe and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, an in-depth look at the practices and principles of Amish parents and how they raise children who are self-sufficient, hard-working, and remarkably happy.
The more time Serena Miller spent in Holmes County, Ohio, doing research for her popular Amish novels, the more she began to notice something-Amish children were the happiest children she'd ever seen. Despite not having modern toys and conveniences, they are joyful, serene, calm, and respectful-not to mention whipping up full meals and driving buggies before most of us will allow our children…
