The Choice by Suzanne Woods Fisher was a rather enjoyable book about Amish life. It was an easy read that gave great incite about Amish life in the Lancaster area.
Throughout my life, I’ve been fascinated by Amish life. I can contribute this to the fact I used to travel to Lancaster on a regular basis and the fact my mom has a similar interest. For a long time my mom and I have been trading books about Amish life especially those by Beverly Lewis. But fictional books about Amish life start to get repetitive. This became especially true with Beverly Lewis. So I while I love the subject, I was a wee bit skeptical about reading The Choice. I didn’t feel like getting a lecture about Plain/English that I’ve seen a dozen times before.
I was pleasantly surprised by Suzanne Woods Fisher’s approach. She just wrote an engaging book about Amish life but didn’t harp on the differences between Plain/English. It was just there and you could pick up on things but it didn’t scream out that she just researched a specific thing and wanted to share it. I also like how she included a lot of adages and sayings. I haven’t seen some of them before and it was just a nice touch.
I will admit the title is a little misleading. The Choice isn’t the protagonist’s choice to make. Carrie’s mind was set. She was going to live an Amish lifestyle. It was more the people around Carrie that were making heavy life choices when it came to faith and how to handle life.
One of the things I really liked was how the characters and the situations in the book felt real. You could just dive in and think ‘yes that fits my view of Amish life’. I could understand the pull of love that Carrie felt and the delving into feelings as she was dealing with daily life.
The book just gave me a sense of peace and reminded me of the power of faith.
One of the things that did throw me was the massive use of Deitsch (the PA form of Deutsch spoken by the Amish). I took several years of German so there is a part of me that wanted to pick apart the use/misuse of the German phrases but I had to remind myself it’s a dialect. There are times words were approximated from the German but the author was really good at giving translations.
This book was so well written, that I was looking forward to reading the second book in the Secrets of Lancaster County The Waiting.
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