Why is amish fiction so popular

Not quite all. Many of the Amish people I have spoken with display a mix of bemusement and disgust at the novels, especially the covers, with their airbrushed models with plucked eyebrows. The wife of a Lancaster County Amish bishop told me about some of the novels she has read and smiled as she recounted some of the common themes and events, including buggy accidents. Not realistic. His daughter, now the mother of three children, likes to talk about literature.

A basket of petunias hangs from the laundry line, and cliff swallows dart in and out of their gourd-shaped nests under the eaves of the barn. On the ground near our chairs, her young son feeds flies to a baby swallow that has fallen out of its nest. As we chat, it becomes apparent that this Amish woman has very little patience for Amish fiction.

They think we should long for all the things you have. But readers wishing for a happy ending need not fear. By discovering a satin baby dress in the basement, Katie learns that she was adopted by an Amish family as a baby.

The trilogy that The Shunning inaugurates follows Katie on her journey to find her birth mother, claim her real identity as an heiress, and eventually reunite with the long-lost love of her youth, Daniel, who also grew up Amish. By the end of the series, Katie and Daniel have made a partial return to Amishness by becoming conservative Mennonite, a liminal space between plain and fancy.

It is lines like this that raise the hackles of one Old Order Amish woman with whom I spoke. In addition to their distaste for proselytizing, most Amish hold a view of salvation at odds with the evangelical idea of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Yoder, too, is disturbed by Amish novels that contain a lot of devotional content. This same writer expresses concern about the particular brand of romance found in these novels and how it might affect conjugal relations among the Amish community.

But her concern is also rooted in a uniquely Amish perspective on courtship and marriage. Amish people reading books by non-Amish writers is nothing new. One Old Order Amish mother in Lancaster County told me her teenage daughter and her friends have all read Before You Meet Prince Charming , a chastity manual for young Christian women, and Amish women repeatedly told me how popular the inspirational novels of Karen Kingsbury are in their communities.

Nor are Amish interactions with evangelicalism a new phenomenon. Occasionally I encounter Amish people — including ones who have never read an Amish romance novel — who sound remarkably like any jeans-wearing evangelical sipping a latte down at your local megachurch.

What is new about the Amish-reading-Amish-fiction phenomenon has to do with the psychic power of the novel. Fiction, after all, is like a dressing room, allowing the reader to try on the costume of the Other. When an Amish woman reads Amish novels, she encounters heroines who, although dressed like herself, have wholly evangelical souls.

She gets to inhabit characters who assume the legitimacy of their own emotions about faith and romance, who are agents at the very center of the devotional and romantic action. In a culture that values submissiveness and sacrifice, especially in women, laying claim to the self is no small thing.

If Amish women begin reading Amish novels en masse, will they threaten the bonds of male ecclesial authority that have thus far been a constitutive element of their culture?

And Christian evangelical culture itself, of course, is hardly an apotheosis of gender equality. Valerie Weaver-Zercher says this was the most-often asked question while researching her Amish fiction study, Thrill of the Chaste. In her book, Weaver-Zercher lists common inaccuracies, including off-key depictions of excommunication and shunning , and unusual portrayals of day-to-day Amish behavior. However she also notes that authors she spoke with displayed a commitment to research and accuracy.

Some do. These include both youth and some adults in the community. Some bookstores in Amish communities carry Amish fiction novels, as does the Amish-frequented bookmobile in one large settlement. Others dislike the genre. Read more. Erik Wesner, 11 Feb.

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By Daniel Lattier. Yes, you read that correctly: Amish romance novels. So they read romance novels instead. Add a Comment. Join the conversation My review of an Amish romance.