Amish romance novels! TOTALLY SPOILERY BUT THAT'S OKAY.

[ang]

OH MAN, YOU GUYS. So I have been reading Beverly Lewis's Abram's Daughters series at work lately. And in the FIRST PART, one of the Amish girls is ~seduced~ by an English boy and gets pregnant, and the boy is totally horrible, and she keeps her pregnancy a ~secret~ and then has the baby but it is stillborn and then eventually she gets shunned. BUT HER BABY IS NOT ACTUALLY STILLBORN, even though the only person who knows this is the doctor. And the book is basically like, and the doctor found a nice home for the baby to get adopted into! Yay!

Well, the girl in that book was pregnant at the same time as her mother was, and the daughter had a boy, and the mother had a girl, and I HAVE BEEN WAITING THIS WHOLE TIME FOR ACCIDENTAL INCEST. And basically the books make you think the son is this boy Carl who was adopted by a Mennonite family, and he's in the same class in school as Lydiann (the mother's baby), but then she thinks of him "like a brother" and I was very sad.

BUT THEN IN BOOK FOUR YOU FIND OUT THAT THE SON IS ACTUALLY THIS AMISH KID THAT LYDDIE IS DATING. AND I WAS LIKE "YESSSSSSSSSSSS."

Anyway, like the entire rest of the books are made up of slut-shaming, all her Amish protagonists being secretly more evangelical types than Amish people, and, like, all the stuff I actually want to read (like Mary Ruth becoming a teacher and getting involved with Robert Schwartz after she moves out and becomes a Mennonite instead of getting baptized) gets totally skipped over when a new chapter starts and it's suddenly four years later or some shit.

Also, these people have the most hilariously confusing family tree even without the secret baby.

Comments

[petra]

My mom gives me updates on an actual Amish community from time to time and she always has to hyper-specify the people in question. You know, Daniel Miller who's Eli Miller's brother, not Daniel Miller who's Eli Miller's son, and not *old* Daniel Miller either, that's Eli Miller's father. Daniel Miller! Sure. Yeah. Okay, what was the story? &c.

[ang]

Ahahaha. This actually sounds like a non-Amish family I know. There's just a lot of name recycling and it gets confusing.

[shewhohashope]

BUT THEN IN BOOK FOUR YOU FIND OUT THAT THE SON IS ACTUALLY THIS AMISH KID THAT LYDDIE IS DATING. AND I WAS LIKE "YESSSSSSSSSSSS."

WAIT. WHAT BOOKS ARE THESE, AND HOW COULD ONE PROCURE THEM?

[ang]

Beverly Lewis's Abram's Daughters series. I believe the specific books are called The Covenant, The Betrayal, The Sacrifice, and The Prodigal. There's a fifth book, but I haven't read it yet.

They are Amish romances, which means they are largely about Jesus, and also about secret babies. My coworker gets them from the library, but I don't know how popular the genre is in your area.