I have recently joined BookSneeze, which allows you to pick a book from their list, and will mail it to you – for free! In exchange, you have to read and write a review about it. Not bad, huh?
I placed my request sometime last year and actually forgot about it, until I received a notice from the post office in December last year. It was the book I requested from BookSneeze!
I chose An Amish Wedding by Beth Wiseman, Kathleen Fuller and Kelly Long. I was once a bride myself and I thought it’ll be interesting to know what an Amish wedding looks like.
The book turned out to be a nice and fun reading. Although I know very little about the Amish Mennonites community, I realized that their values are fairly similar to those of us Catholics. The importance of commitment, honesty and trust for soon-to-wed couples, as well as the high regard for chastity before wedding, are manifested in the characters of Rose, Naomi and Priscilla – the three lovable characters in this book. Their stories were written separately by Wiseman, Fuller and Long, but were brilliantly weaved together by the authors that you won’t feel you have missed out on anything.
But more than anything else, this book is about romantic love, and it did not fail to make me emotionally happy. I love Naomi’s story the most, because it’s about finding one’s true love (I think everyone will agree with me when I say that this is the best-selling plot for any romance novel). But I could relate with Priscilla’s story as well (the bride who thought her wedding will not push through because of the unfavorable things happening on the days leading to the big day) because I did experience bumps in my own wedding preparations and still had the most wonderful wedding I could remember (hehe!). Rose, on the other hand, discovered something about her fiance (which is in a scandalous proportion), thus testing their relationship as an engaged couple.
The three girls’ stories were all heart-warming and reading them, I didn’t feel alienated at all with the totally different culture I was peering into. In an Amish weddings, I learned that the bride wore a blue dress, no make-up or ring, and after the wedding there is no honeymoon but instead the couple will visit the houses of their relatives and friends who attended their wedding.
These aside, the experiences of the three girls in the stories were no less different from ours, and this made me realize that falling in love is indeed a sweet trap, and that feeling is universal, irregardless of what religion you believe, or way of life you practice.
I watched a movie once about Amish. I got curious and read more about it. They have a very interesting life and community, very traditional. I can’t believe that such kind of community still exists nowadays but I am really fascinated with their way of life.