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Book Review: Gathering of Sisters
Jul. 27th, 2018 09:23 amDarla Weaver’s Gathering of Sisters: A Year with My Old Order Mennonite Family is part of the Herald Press series Plainspoken, in which Amish and Mennonite writers write about their own lives and experiences for a general audience. I loved one of the other books in this series (Lucinda Miller’s Anything But Simple) and therefore came to this book with possibly too-high expectations.
It’s a nice book. It’s a pleasant book if you like reading about people’s daily lives, which I do. (My dream is that someday there will be a miniseries called A Day in the Life of Hobbiton, in which we follow hobbits through an ordinary day: breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lots of time in the pantry, lots of time in the garden, possibly an excursion into the forest to hunt mushrooms or berries... )
It’s a safe book. I don’t expect (or want) an exploration of the dark underbelly of Amish life from this series, but any community in the world will have fault lines and tensions - about appropriate dress, appropriate level of engagement with pop culture, what kind of food to eat and when and how to eat it. We’re an argumentative species. But there’s really no sign of this here.
At one point Weaver mentions that her favorite artist is Thomas Kinkade, which I think explains a lot about this book. It’s is not quite as fluffy as a Thomas Kinkade painting, but in both cases, the picture needs a little bit of shadow to become fully three-dimensional.
It’s a nice book. It’s a pleasant book if you like reading about people’s daily lives, which I do. (My dream is that someday there will be a miniseries called A Day in the Life of Hobbiton, in which we follow hobbits through an ordinary day: breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lots of time in the pantry, lots of time in the garden, possibly an excursion into the forest to hunt mushrooms or berries... )
It’s a safe book. I don’t expect (or want) an exploration of the dark underbelly of Amish life from this series, but any community in the world will have fault lines and tensions - about appropriate dress, appropriate level of engagement with pop culture, what kind of food to eat and when and how to eat it. We’re an argumentative species. But there’s really no sign of this here.
At one point Weaver mentions that her favorite artist is Thomas Kinkade, which I think explains a lot about this book. It’s is not quite as fluffy as a Thomas Kinkade painting, but in both cases, the picture needs a little bit of shadow to become fully three-dimensional.
