NEVER AN AMISH BRIDE

Esther Miller, a 23-year-old Amish woman living in the village of Honey Brook, Pennsylvania, has been mourning the death of her fiance, Jacob, for two years as her friends and sisters get married, and she chafes at the tension between her dreams and Amish “plain living.” (She has a flourishing business selling handmade, floral-scented soap, but the “English” women who buy it crave stronger fragrances that could run afoul of Amish strictures against perfume.) Then she encounters Lucas Brenneman, Jacob’s handsome brother, who disappeared 10 years ago during his Rumspringa; he’s come home to work as a physician’s assistant and has adopted a new lifestyle, complete with pickup truck and satellite dish. Esther and Lucas feel drawn to each other and commence a tacit courtship, consisting mainly of long talks about family secrets, God, and their mutual sense of not fitting in; Esther even flirts and dines alone with Lucas and experiences a buggy crash that scandalously ends with him lying on top of her. Can they possibly have a future together? In this series starter, London paints a warm, vivid portrait of Amish life, centered on big farm families, kitchen chores, dressmaking, and caretaking of mules, goats, and children. It’s all couched in limpid prose with flashes of Austen-ite wit; when tried by her vain sister’s demands, for instance, “Esther inwardly sighed and tried to remember what her mother said about keeping her word, and what the preacher said last Sunday about showing unbridled charity toward others, and what the Bible said about not killing.” Esther’s life is replete with conundrums that may sound comically overstated to “English” ears—“If she couldn’t control her will enough to obey the simple rule of limiting the scents in her soap, how else might she sin in the future?”—but they effectively convey the moral seriousness of her Amish ethos. Her attachment to Lucas develops chastely, which makes the longing they feel for each other seem all the more intense.

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