Tuesday, September 10, 2013

A Season for Tending more than tends to be a must read

          "God used the oddest situations to line people up and gt them involved in each other's lives" (Woodsmall 297).  The journey the characters in Cindy Woodsmall's book A Season for Tending Amish Vines and Orchards, Book 1 is sometimes as gnarled as an old abandon apple tree left to face the elements and storms and survive the best it can.  And the journey is sometimes as beautiful as that same apple tree cared for and fed so that it's full of the rich, abundance of a bountiful harvest.  What is truly magnetic in this book is Woodsmall's way of writing these two realities so that they can be seen as the two sides of the coin of life.
         The life flowing out of Woodsmall's pen, it is an Amish book and so it would be poorly done to reference computer, is not just apple trees, ways of life of Amish and non-Amish people, and events, but the characters.  Yes, most writers create characters that are alive, it does seem to work easier to have a story about living characters, but Woodsmall seems to have the truly amazing gift of taking these "living" characters and allowing them their own lives.  This is a must read for anyone looking for characters that, more than being just ink on a page, spring from that page and have a life of their own.
          The story has its ups and downs as any good book, and the motion of the plot definitely drive it on.  For a reader who never reads even the smallest novel in less than a week, this was an exceedingly quick read--just over twenty four hours.  At times, it was easy to mentally screech the protagonist is going to be with the wrong guy! And then at the same time it is easy to either laugh aloud or cry from the beauty of a moment.  Though the events were in an Amish community and it was confusing at first to place book in a specific time period it eventually came out, and in spite of that, or perhaps because of that it felt easy to see where the plot seemed merely a mirror held up to the reader's own life; a mirror that allows one to get a much clearer view.  God is intrinsically a part of this piece, but more so than merely because it involves Amish people.  No, God is part of this book because He is part of the characters' lives.  It is all so natural and unforced.  Even the ending line, talking about not getting in the way of what God wanted to accomplish felt so natural because the character had become so real that it made perfect sense for him to think that. Perhaps the one real complaint was that the book ended... it seemed it ended too soon, but instead of being a flaw as it sometimes tends to be, it is instead a fire lit under this reader to find and read the next book in the series.
          Therefore, for readers with passions for orchards, gardens, horticulture, family, comedy, exploring the relationship between siblings, encouragement, reader about God loving characters, romance, or just straight strong characters this book should move to the front of the queue for books to purchase, read, and fall in love with.

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