Book 36: The Waiting

The Waiting was a let down by Suzanne Woods Fischer. I thoroughly enjoyed The Choice, that I might have had too high of expectations for The Waiting. It seemed like everything that I loved in the first book didn’t exist in the second book.

One of the biggest things that threw me in The Waiting was how it was placed 40 years in the past from the first book. It just throws you. There was almost no warning about the shift to the past. It just seems weird to have one book take place in current time and then the following book take place in the past. It would have made more sense to order the books in reverse.

Plus there is only character that links book one and book two in the series that is Esther. The family names are the same but they are completely different. Just seems weird to have a background character continue to be a background character. It would have been a great opportunity to make Ester really shine or to make them into two separate characters.

But overall the characters didn’t feel Amish to me. They seemed quite frankly English. I just didn’t feel the book read true. I didn’t get that sense of peace and trust in God. In fact the idea of God was so far in the background, it was almost easy to forget that the main character Cal/Caleb was a pastor.

Plus one of the things that would just take me out of the narrative was how characters would just disappear/appear and there were seemly characters with more then two hands. It seemed like in this book, I was constantly looking to see if I missed something when I read a phrase but usually the character did just go missing. But it takes away from the novel to reread something just to try and make a scene make sense.

The only good thing I really liked about the book was the idea of the Amish and the conscious observer during the Vietnam War. There are different types of observers in the war and you saw the two. One who goes to the front as a non-combatant and the one who stays outside of the war. That was an interesting divide I wouldn’t have thought of if wasn’t for the Waiting.