I forget just where I picked up this bit of literary wisdom, but it’s said there are two plots that cover just about every story: “Somebody goes on a journey” and “A stranger comes to town.” In Barbara Cameron’s Quilts of Lancaster County series, though, you get both.
Okay, technically, Jenny King isn’t a complete stranger to the Amish when she shows up at her grandmother’s house in the opening pages of A Time to Love, but she might as well be. Her father had long ago broken away from the faith, and she hasn’t even visited in years. That’s still long enough for Matthew Bontrager—the widower who fell in love with Jenny during her last visit to Lancaster County, when they were both teenagers—to be filled with doubt about whether their relationship could possibly work... doubts she, too, fights to overcome as she adjusts to her new life.
Jenny’s father whisked her away from Matthew because he thought his daughter would be stifled within the Amish community; in the years since her departure, she became a television news correspondent, filing stories on the plight of children caught in war zones around the world. That reporting made her the target of an attempted car bombing, and she’s staying with her grandmother while she recuperates from extensive physical injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the attack.
During a critical part of her medical treatment, Jenny is sent to a veteran’s hospital for tests where she has a brief encounter with one of the patients, a soldier named Chris Matlock who has also been wounded by bombs. Their conversation barely lasts two pages, but it sets up the story for A Time to Heal, as Chris heads straight for Lancaster County after his release, hoping to regain a sense of peace and fulfillment. Jenny’s already married Matthew by then, but Matthew has a headstrong younger sister, Hannah, who’s never found any of the Amish men in the community suitable for marriage...
A while back, I was asked how somebody like me—so big-city liberal I wish Obama would quit dragging his heels on same-sex marriage—would be interested in Amish romance. Part of the answer is that, as a genre, it’s openly concerned with exploring how people reconcile their life choices with their faith and their spiritual convictions. Characters regularly ask themselves whether it’s God’s will that they should pursue a relationship rather than, say, what the ton would think about it. (Which isn’t to say that the latter question is inconsequential; in their own way, each is a recognition that a good romance story is as much about reconciling an inner emotional conflict as it is about securing a relationship with someone else.) That emphasis on faith is matched, at least in my general experience, by a chasteness in tone, and as the Amish romance cannot rely on the steady escalation of physical passion to pace the relationship, it instead intensifies the emotional dimensions.
Now, with some writers, that leads to a lot of telling how the characters feel rather than showing, but Barbara Cameron handles herself pretty well on this score. Yes, we spend a lot of time inside characters’s heads, but it tends to feel naturalistic rather than obtrusive. Similarly, the scenes where Cameron’s characters talk out their feelings are less prone to heavy-handed sermonizing. None of the Amish characters are shy about discussing their beliefs, but when, for example, Jenny’s grandmother explains how she tries not to worry because worrying shows a lack of trust in God, it comes across as a sincere expression of faith rather than the author seeing an opportunity to insert a talking point.
At the same time, Cameron doesn’t shy away from tough subjects. Chris’s military background leads to intense conversation about whether an ex-soldier can truly embrace Amish values (or, for that matter, whether Amish can truly accept an ex-soldier into their fold). And the fact that troubles from his past have followed him to Lancaster County raise the issue of radical forgiveness—a core Amish principle that can pose a significant challenge to living one’s faith.
What little I know about the third book in the series, A Time for Peace (which comes out this fall), it’s going to involve a similar testing of faith, as revelations about Jenny’s past combine with present misfortunes to put the happiness she found by converting and marrying Matthew to the test. (Crises in an existing marriage are another common theme in Amish romances; married couples, after all, are allowed greater intimacy.) After getting to know the Bontrager family in the first two novels, I’m interested in seeing how it all turns out—or, since it doesn’t sound like any strangers will be coming to town this time, just where everybody will end up.
Ron Hogan is the founding curator of Beatrice.com, one of the first websites to focus on books and authors, and the master of ceremonies for Lady Jane’s Salon, a monthly reading series in New York City for romance authors and their fans.
