Ties That Bind by Cindy Woodsmall is a book about twenty-year-old Ariana Brenneman, a daughter of a large Amish family. Ariana loves the Old Order Amish community she has been raised in and is broken hearted when she discovers that one of her siblings plans to leave the Amish and abandon the traditional ways. Ariana plans to open a café in historic Summer Grove and help keep her sister in the Amish fold, but raising money to buy the old café isn’t the only unforeseen roadblock she faces. The secret aftermath of a fire that happened twenty years earlier at the time of her birth, surfaces and threatens to destroy Ariana, her family and all that she holds dear.
I have read quite a few books about the Amish, and I really enjoy most of them, but I did not enjoy this book. The conflicts and problems seemed contrived and unnatural. The characters were flat and not particularly likable. The Amish faith and way of life was portrayed as something that needed to be escaped from, but the non-Amish, English characters were no better than the Amish. Ariana’s Amish parents, sibling and boy friend seemed weak and incapable of doing anything without the consent and guidance of the ex-Amish man, Quill, who has been helping members of the church leave and join “English” society. The author tries to make Quill a hero of sorts in the story, but he comes across as more of a “rebel without a cause.” We know that he was somehow romantically involved with Ariana when they were about 15-years-old, but we never really know why he “left the fold” with another girl, who he supposedly married, but really didn’t. The reader also never finds out exactly why Quill “had no choice” but to leave the Amish and help others leave as well. Maybe that is another mystery left to the next book in this series. I struggled to get through this 339 page book, only to discover that there was no real resolution to the main conflict at the end, and too many lose ends left dangling. Apparently, the reader will need to buy book two in The Amish of Summer Grove series to find out more, but I will not be one of them. Ties That Bindwas plenty for me. I am not particularly interested in finding out how the story ends.
After I finished this book, I realized that I had read another book by Cindy Woodsmall, a few years back and didn’t like that one much either.
I would give this book two stars ** out of five, so you can tell that I really didn’t like it much.
Full disclose: Blogging for Books provided me with a copy of the book to review, but my candid review and opinion is completely mine.
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