Book Review: A Journey of Faith

Title: A Journey of Faith

Author: Sylvia Price

Date: 2025

Quote: "Dean will be staying here at the inn for two weeks."

Melinda was born and brought up Amish. Most people in the Eastern States and Canada have at least heard of the Amish denomination as the most conspicuous of American Protestant church groups. They preserve a close-knit community by pooling their resources and practicing a strict rule of frugality that goes back to eighteenth-century Germany. Oldfashioned clothes, horse-drawn buggies, and houses without electric lights identify the Amish. Tourists try to photograph them, and Amish people traditionally turn their heads away because their rule of modesty discourages posing for pictures, but they trade with tourists willingly enough, selling farm produce and home crafts. They are known for raising good produce and making good quilts, furniture, and other home crafts they sell. Nearly all Amish people are of working-class German origins with very little crossbreding with any other European tribe; many still speak "Pennsylvania German" in their home. 

("Pennsylvania German" dialect can still be understood, with varying degrees of difficulty, by people who grew up in modern German. The Pennsylvania German words used in this novelette are kept to a minimum and sound similar in English, modern German, or Pennsylvania German, but they're spelled phonetically rather than like their modern German equivalents.) 

Why do most Amish youth choose to be baptized into their parents' church? It's not obligatory. In fact they traditionally get about a year of Rumspringe, "running around," before they're asked to decide to join the church or move out into the non-Amish world. They usually opt to stay with their friends and relatives, even though, by now, the pool of potential mates is shrinking.

Amish people cannot marry non-Amish people and stay in the church. If they leave the church, they are supposed to be shunned by the Amish community. The community could use a bit of fresh DNA but the only way their church's rule allows them to get it is in the very rare case when a non-Amish person chooses to be bound by all of the rules, from radical nonviolence to wearing traditional German peasant clothes. (Not the sometimes colorful and extravagant festival costumes that were chosen to identify different towns, back in German, but the plain, drab work clothes that haven't changed all that much in going on four hundred years.) Although the Mennonites, Brethren, Hutterites, Bruderhof, and more distantly the Quakers are "Peace Churches" that formed during the same period of religious reformation as the Amish church did, Amish people don't marry members of those more liberal denominations. 

I looked this up, after reading the novel. I wanted to know. Years ago, when my brother's class had to write research papers about the Amish (more or less like the fictional class in https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-terrible-term-paper.html ), a question none of our sources answered was whether the Amish ever have accepted a convert. It's almost  unheard-of for anyone to want to join the Amish. It requires learning a new language for pity's sake. (Even to people from Germany, Pennsylvania German is a new language.) So nobody mentioned whether it had ever happened. Google now reports that it is possible, and has happened, but it is extremely rare. Nobody would join the Amish after spending two weeks at an Amish bed-and-breakfast, however charming. 

Though easy to trade with, the Amish are, according to their rule, difficult to get to know personally. They'll listen to specifications and tell you all about their wares, but they're not supposed to make friends outside the church. 

So in this novel we're supposed to believe that a good Amish girl like Melinda, whose new-adult energy is committed to following the rules and fulfilling her obligations to her community, is going to hang out talking to a non-Amish man called Dean Dominguez for two weeks? Letting herself be tempted to put her quilts on a web site? And her family are going to let her? 

And Dean Dominguez is going to decide he wants to be Amish?

I'm sorry. My suspension of disbelief broke down. This is a sweet romance, and something like it may  even have happened in the Canadian Mennonite group Price knows; a rogue Amish person and sympathetic non-Amish person might compromise and join the Mennonite church. (Mennonites traditionally dress almost like Amish people, with subtle variations for easy group identification, but their rules don't demand quite as much frugality--they can go to college and use computers. Also, Mennonites in the US and Canada usually speak English at home.) But it's not something that's supposed to happen in the Amish church. In a longer story that unfolded over a longer time frame I could believe Dean and Melinda could become an Amish couple, but in two weeks... ?????

Let's just say that the "happy ending" of this romance promises some turbulence ahead.