Once upon a time, there was a popular literary genre, briefly summarized as, 'British schoolchildren get shipwrecked and have wonderful adventures on their own while remaining fully civilized'. Around the same time there was a man named William Golding who loathed that genre. So he sat down and wrote The Lord of the Flies, which took the same general premise, then applied realism to it, creating the horrifying reality of what society would become without any form of moral governance or discipline.
What does this have to do with Amish Romance? Basically, most of my friends and I agree that it's an overdone, repetitive genre severely lacking in any realism. So my siblings and I decided to write a satire of it, much in the spirit of The Lord of the Flies.
So we supposed we should probably read some Amish Romance.
We had no idea it'd be this bad.
The Premise of The Secret
Grace, Lettie's eldest daughter, is concerned for her mother, but also preoccupied with her impending engagement to Henry, a shy, quiet man of upstanding repute in the community.
Judah, Lettie's husband, is concerned for his sheep.
In the middle of all this, an Englisher girl named Heather finds out she has cancer and decides to pursue natural therapy in Amish country.
The Problems of The Secret
Whoooooooooooooo boi.
We got a lot.
We're up to 13 pages.
Single-spaced.
I'll try to trim them down just enough to cover the major points.
The Technicalities:
From a dry writer's perspective, the writing style of this book is just... terrible.
To be fair, I've never published a book, let alone the 100+ that Beverly Lewis has, but that's partially because I have a habit of creating projects too ambitious for a beginning, and partially because I'm a perfectionist - thus the many many writing articles, books, and magazines that I own and reread every other day.
When you're learning how to write fiction, there are certain technicalities that you're taught from the get-go, such as:
1. Avoid dumping a ton of information on the reader at once
2. There has to be a point to what you bring into focus
3. Pacing. There's a strategy to it.
4. Use good grammar (unless you're writing dialogue for a specific character type.)
5. Be careful not to repeat phrases (unless they mean something, I.E. "May the Force be with you")
6. Be clear in what point of view (POV) and tense you're writing in.
7. Be consistent with 'the rules' of your world (unless you're drawing attention to something suddenly different.)
Pretty easy rules. And yet this book manages to ignore every single one of them.
In the prologue, we get a whopping TON of information, jumping back and forth between every time frame and tense, from the main problem of the plot to a summary of Grace's father's personality to the fact that Grace's brother is going to be married soon to her opinion of his fiance to how Grace has to preserve her reputation of being an industrious woman by never being late to work and then suddenly back to the main problem. If that sentence made your brain hurt, that's a lot easier than the 4 pages of that all to tell us, "Mama's acting strange for no discernible reason and Grace is concerned," which is also a summary of the first 11 chapters, too.
Another thing which isn't necessarily talked about in writing circles - probably because it's supposed to be obvious - is giving your characters set opinions.
Everyone alive has an opinion on something. Even if someone says it's best to avoid conflict and be open-minded about things, that's a set opinion and if you argue against it, they'll stand to defend it (hello, conflict!)
This point sort of bleeds into the sections on characters and motive, too.
Basically, your characters need to have set opinions, personalities, etc. and through that, you, the storyteller, should portray the world in a manner to show your opinions of it. (One great example of this is Fairest by Marissa Meyer, a book set in the midst of a sci-fi story, that is solely the villain's backstory, from the villain's perspective. Now, it brushes the side of justifying the villain, but it doesn't in that it compares and contrasts her personality and her view of love with that of the other characters, so that despite feeling pain for this villain, you can still see that she is warped and evil in her actions.)
The Characters:
Generally, you want the audience to at least empathize with your characters. Liking them is good, but empathy is the bare minimum you can reach, which sometimes works out for a good story! In Iron Man, for example, Tony Stark is a terrible, condescending, selfish jerk for the entire first act, but we end up rooting for him from the beginning because we've seen his charisma, how he puts others at ease - joking with soldiers escorting him across the Middle East, only to see those soldiers abruptly murdered in front of him, and him unable to help no matter how hard he earnestly tries.
I hate every single one of the characters in this book.
Except maybe the elder brother. He's the only one with a brain and moral backbone in this circus.
The protagonist, Grace, I think was supposed to come off as perfect - a shining example to stand against the resident regular American girl, Heather - but with every passing page, she just becomes more bland, spineless, and ultimately self-contradicting. The only real scene suggesting a character arc was when after chapters of sadness, she has one. half. chapter. of anger towards her mother for walking out on them, then breaks down in a tearful prayer of repentance and suddenly she has a new outlook on life and never has any flaws ever again in this book.
Her father, Judah, is just... Well, these are some jewels from his personality:
- Pondering how long it will be before his wife gets over her sadness and behaves 'like a good wife'
- Telling his wife, as she's trying to tell him what's been bothering her, to talk to someone else
- Telling his wife to just stay busy to distract herself from her problems
- Literally running away from her as she's trying to explain her pain to her
- Fuming over how his lambing season would be going so much better if his wife were there (so she could miraculously save the life of a lamb that no one else could, apparently)
- Mourning to himself that his wife treated him coldly and cruelly by walking out on him
- When he's questioned about why his wife walked out on him, his only explanation is that he hasn't been having sex with her for a long time, due to his work and his age.
Also he's victimized in all this.
Lettie herself is really in the anti-hero zone right now, as we're so mad at Judah we can understand why she walked out on him, AND she seems to be doing it for a noble plotline of her own, but at the same time she didn't have a second thought for the children she left behind really. She just worried if she disappointed poor, lovely Judah.
Heather is a terrible, cliched depiction of an unsaved American girl, complete with inner monologue about prayer being a waste of time and listening to bands of girls hating boys at 'teeth rattling' volumes. Oh, also she says WebMD is a reliable source of information, so take that as you will.
Grace's fiance, Henry, is the boyfriend who's just too perfect at first, and then the more you hear about him, you realize he's a guy who basically seems ashamed to have her as a girlfriend and has the backbone of a cream eclair. (Tip for y'all, if the person your dating is 'too shy' to openly, publicly show that you're dating, that person isn't adult enough.)
Grace's grandmother Ada is vying for second place as the worst person in the world, due to the fact that she - no, I don't care about spoilers anymore - is super passive-aggressive to her neighbors and forced her daughter to give up her child born of wedlock immediately, not even allowing her to see the baby and then forced her into marrying another man she didn't love and turned out to be very emotionally abusive (but, y'know, he's steady and dependable that way.)
Also she describes the baby as a 'sinful result' of Lettie's actions, which is extremely horrible.
The only character we actually like would be the elder brother, Adam. Adam is the only one with a brain. Adam straight-up challenged his dad's emotional abuse, AND also listens to Grace's problems and doesn't force her to change her opinions, respecting her decisions for her life!
The rest of the children are just unnatural. Their mother walks out and the youngest daughter comes to the blissful conclusion that 'she must've had a good reason, so I don't worry about it!'
While we're on the topic, these characters just have the most bland and unnatural reactions to a traumatic event - like abandonment - that I have ever seen. Grace gets a lump in her throat, then goes home and makes breakfast for her family, all the while wondering and worrying about why their mother left them.
Now, to be fair, there are many different ways to respond to sudden trauma, but this senario just doesn't work. Some people freeze, unsure of what to do, some people break down instantly, some people go into task-mode, etc, etc.
We could argue that Grace is going into task-mode, thus the resign to make breakfast and go from there, but it doesn't quite match up with the whole internal monologue of sorrow. When you're in task-mode, you do not think emotionally. Your sole focus is getting what needs to be done done. Emotions are obstacles. That is task mode.
The Community Representation
One of the most prominent comments we found in public reviews of Beverly Lewis' works was that it 'made people long for a simpler life'.
*Deep breath *
She undeniably romanticizes every single minute aspect of the Amish life, from bonnet-ties to 'majestic silver silos', but the Amish community in this book is so fraught with casual abuse and suppression, we can't tell if she's trying to critique it or romanticize it.
This Amish community is quite frankly a cult, with the bishops decreeing whether or not you can have gas or solar power (thought it's mentioned that in 'stricter communities' they dictate how many times a married couple can have sex, so, y'know, it's not so bad.)
And for a Christian romance, not one of the married couples in this book have healthy, Christian relationships. They don't talk to each other or ask for each other's input in any decisions, and often their tasks around the household seem to be taken for granted (such as when Grace takes on the role of 'mother' to her siblings, no one so much as thanks her or gives her any form of affirmation.)
Overall, the book's treatment of women is both depressing and insulting. Ada's husband is constantly making sexist remarks, such as, "Of course she's moody, she's a woman," all the women are flawlessly beautiful, and the general end goal of all the statements amount to: 'Women should be hardworking, content, HAWT, and never upset about anything' (Seriously, every time Grace is deep in thought and disturbed, the other characters see her as 'sullen', while when her father is in the same state, he's described as 'distressed' and 'suffering'.)
The point:
There is none. Seriously. We have no idea what she was trying to say with this.
So, to sum this all up:
But we're reading the sequel anyway to see if things get better.
