Book Review: The Struggle

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Struggle (Kentucky Brothers, not numbered)

Author: Wanda E. Brunstetter

Author's web site: https://wandabrunstetter.com/

Date: 2012

Publisher: Barbour

ISBN: 978-1-61626-089-7

Length: 380 pages

Quote: “Save your marriage? If you ask me, taking Hannah away from her mamm is more likely to ruin your marriage than to save it!”

Amish people make mistakes too. (Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.) In this novel a young Amish man makes one big mistake, after which his wife makes what might arguably be an even bigger mistake, and they just sputz up their days until a real tragedy comes along.

Brunstetter, who is Mennonite not Amish, is exploiting a wave of interest in the super-conservative Amish in order to present her explanation of how Christians work through and recover from our mistakes. The story would have worked as well or better if the characters had been Mennonites, or Baptists or Lutherans or Seventh-Day Adventists; the story is not about any point of doctrine on which the major Protestant churches disagree.

My feeling is that all this interest in the Amish is justified, because in some ways they’re light-years ahead of other Christians in following the example of Jesus and the apostolic church. People tend to fixate on “Why don’t they drive cars and carry cell phones?” and the Amish, whose super-strict rule includes that English is not their first language, tend to be too modest to spell it out face to face, “Because we use our money to take care of our own, without depending on government health care or farm relief or even tax-funded schools, that’s why.” Amish people live extremely simple, frugal, low-tech lives, as close as possible to the way Germans of the laboring class were living in the eighteenth century, in order to survive as completely self-sustaining small farmers and craftsmen. And although you probably have to be born Amish to join the Amish church, as our national debt spirals toward bankruptcy it becomes clearer every day that other churches have a lot to learn from the Amish example.

I still think there’s something deeply weird about a genre of “Amish Romances” being written by non-Amish people, in English, in view of the fact that strict Amish people don’t even read romances...Brunstetter has written dozens of these stories, so she must be making money at it. I’d hope that that money is going back to the Amish church.

Anyway: Although Hannah, portrayed on the cover, and Timothy, her husband, look as if they’re reenacting a scene from the year 1750, they are modern people. They don’t watch the TV shows that popularized the clichés they’ve learned to use in English. They speak what linguists can still identify as a form of an eighteenth century working-class German dialect, as their first language; Brunstetter handles this problem by translating most of each sentence into English but throwing a Pennsylvania German word onto each page. When a character says mamm instead of Mom, that’s meant to remind us that if the scene were actually happening we would not be hearing English, or even English with a Pennsylvania accent; we would be hearing a language people in Bonn or Berlin would be just barely able to recognize as made up of German words, though spelled, pronounced, and used differently from the words in use in modern Germany. Nevertheless they have picked up some of the latest clichés from Oprah and Dr. Phil, third-hand, fourth-hand.

Hannah may be just a little bit too attached to her parents, or Timothy may be just a little bit insecure. Anyway, Timothy thinks he can save the marriage by demanding that Hannah move from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, where Timothy’s brothers live. “Leave and cleave!”

I’m disappointed; another thing I’ve long admired about the Amish is the fact that most of them seem to be free from the “nomadic” tendencies that burden so many other Americans. (My parents were nomads before they were landowners. Being landowners is better.) For me a satisfactory ending to this story would be “So that tragic accident mentioned on the back cover happens to Timothy, and the way it happens impresses firmly on his mind that if God had wanted Timothy and Hannah to be in Kentucky God would not have made them Pennsylvanians.” That’s not how the story ends. Well, I don’t usually like novels anyway...

Hannah goes into a sulk. They don’t get a divorce, or threaten one. They separate. Of course, this being a romance...

Well, I’m always cynical about a romance. You may like them.. If you like romances, you’ll probably enjoy The Struggle.

Although it's not really old or rare, Brunstetter's fans are keeping prices for used copies up on Amazon. You can buy this one as a Fair Trade Book in support of this web site, for $10 per hardcover or $15 per paperback book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, or you can buy it as a new book. Either way Brunstetter will still get her payments per agreement with Barbour; if you buy The Struggle as a Fair Trade Book, she or her Amish informants will get $2 from this web site.