Summertime is a great time to visit the local public library and bring home a stack of new books to read. Grab a big stack, so if one does not catch your fancy, it is easy to put it aside and grab the next book! If it is more interesting when you come back to it later, great. If not, that was why you grabbed a big stack of books in the first place.
Two winners I will recommend:
Shepherd’s Crook by Sheila Webster Boneham and An Amish Year by Beth Wiseman
Very different books indeed, but I loved them both.
An Amish Year by Beth Wiseman
An Amish Year is a collection of four stories – they call them novellas. I am pretty sure that the publishing world has a great long list of rules for each of their categories, but here in redneckville, they are all called stories. There is one story for each of the four seasons of the year, different characters in each one, but a similar locale.
I was surprised? shocked? amazed? to discover that the Amish teens are really no different than my own kids. In my brain, I always picture the Amish teens as being part of the same Walton’s Mountain Norman Rockwell picture perfect world my mom grew up in, where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.
Not a bit. These kids (and the adults) are real and honest and human — and it was very hard to put this book down.
Shepherd’s Crook by Sheila Webster Boneham
Shepherd’s Crook is a mystery. It seems to be the second book in a series, so now I will need to hunt down the first book. It is set in a world filled with dog training competitions and agility trials, sophisticated adults, protesters, questionable politicians and messy puppy antics — aside from the hilarious displays of brattiness on the part of the puppy, the world shown in this book is just as foreign to my life as the Amish culture in the first book. Bratty puppies that destroy a full week’s work, however — **THAT** is something that I have experienced.
Two thumbs up.