For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Genre New To You” category, and given how voraciously, profligately, widely, and not very wisely read, I definitely had to go narrow and niche. So I thought of an Amish romance because I read Lewis’s blog (Rural Revolution). Which is good, because the only other thing that might qualify as some of the more modern monster erotica, and, well, let’s just say I’d only go 14 of 15 on the Winter Reading Challenge if that were my only choice.
So I ordered this book new from Amazon as part of the $10 in padding I needed to get the spare oven heating element I ordered after replacing it yet again in our tiny oven. Ah, gentle reader. I had to return that heating element because it was mailed in a plastic bag and had, strangely enough, gotten bent in transit. A couple days later, I sat down to read a copy of this book, but I discovered that it, too, was no good–someone has spilled coffee or something on it in the bindery, on the pages, before it was bound. The cover was pristine, but the first forty pages were completely unreadable–I mean, the paper quality on this little throwaway are pretty thin, but spilling coffee on them made them translucent and washed much of the print off of them. And some employee let this go through rather than stop the line. I guess I cannot say anything–when I ran a printing press, I let some prescription blanks of questionable quality pass because I was already attracting attention for my waste. Fortunately, Amazon took the second return from three items ordered that day and sent a replacement post haste ergo post (he said, trying to make a pun in Latin because he’s been listening to lectures on Roman authors recently). And I got to read a legible copy. Although, I must note that the replacement copy had light damage, dinging and whatnot, to the edges of the book. Probably as much from the cheap materials as Amazon mishandling, but my Amazon tweehad continues.
So: Well, the characters are all Amish–no Englisch (that is, non-Amish Americans) have speaking roles. Olivia has just moved to a settlement in Montana from Ohio after her father’s death. She is settling into her rental cottage and life as a spinster–she’s almost 30, and, as she and other remind us, she is awfully plain in appearance. One morning, she hears something on her doorstep, and she discovers a baby and a note. Her estranged wild-child sister is off with yet another man and has left her months-old baby for her sister to take care of. Olivia doesn’t know much about children, and when a local handyman appears at the door, she turns to him for help. And he’s handsome, unattached, and also new to the settlement. They’re both kind of starting over after losses–she took care of her father until he died; the handyman is looking for a new start after a relationship ends. They decide to buy a farm together, and to get married to do so–but they encounter some opprobium and a little resistance from the community–and when the sister returns, Olivia is worried she will tempt the handyman–or take the baby away.
The book has rather few events in it, instead padded out a bit by the interior thoughts of the main characters, each wondering at length if the arrangement will end up in a love match, but, no, the other person couldn’t love me. And the book recounts the initial arrival of the baby several times as they recount the story to different people in the settlement.
And it had a couple of things that didn’t seem right to me. The Amish people talk a bit more modern than I would expect despite the interjection of German into the dialog. In the first two chapters, the setup–the baby on the doorstep–is called cliche twice. A couple of different speakers use “literally” when describing something–they use it correctly, but “literally” is a speech tic that not everyone shares. That sort of thing, a speech tic shared by multiple characters, has been something I’ve watched out for ever since college, where one of my colleagues wrote a play where all of the characters exclaimed the name of the person they were talking to when surprised–something she did, but not everyone else did. She, too, probably called a lot of things cliche as was the style at the time. But I guess I could be mistaken–maybe the Amish do say “Whatever” and stuff. My experience with the Amish is avoiding their buggies on regional highways and reading occasional books about Englisch encounters with them. Maybe I should go to some of the localish Amish shops to do my own research.
Eh, not really my genre. I’m sure Mrs. Lewis knows her market and what she’s doing. She’s sold more copies of this book than I have all of my books and my apps put together. Of course, as I read her blog, I can see some parallels to her life in it–like building a pantry into their farmhouse–her husband did that when they moved to their new place a couple years ago–so when I say “I can see,” I mean I sorta can–I remember the pictures she posted.
At any rate, probably a serviceable entry in the genre, but I feel like my boys when they were younger: It would have been better with guns in it (like the genre paperbacks available by subscription that I generally read). I mean, I liked the movie better.
