“The Proving” by Beverly Lewis

OSHBIGOSH AMISH FICTION YOU GUYS.

I’m a great, giant fan of Amish movies—fictional and non-fictional. I can’t think of an Amish movie I disliked, though I wasn’t a fan of Breaking Amish, a TLC series still going on after having done a bit of googling. I admire the lifestyle, though I feel I’m much too English to convert. 😅 While my friends were off dreaming of marrying a prince and becoming a princess, I often found myself dreaming of finding solace in Amish country; despite scandals related to their community, I admired my family-oriented community culture they shared, not having had much of it myself in my younger years with my mother.

So this is one of my “feel-good genres”, as I call them—regardless of whatever tragedy lies in the stories. (Obviously, I love a good tragedy.)

MOVING ON.

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The ProvingThe Proving by Beverly Lewis
Published by Bethany House Publishers on 5 September, 2017
Genre: Amish, Christian fiction, Fiction, Romance
# pages: 446
Source: Publisher
Goodreads
Rating: ★★★★★

Having left the Amish life for the English world, Amanda Dienner is shocked when she learns that her mother has passed and left her Lancaster County's most popular Amish bed-and-breakfast. The catch is she has to run it herself for one year, acting as hostess. Amanda accepts the terms, but coming home to people she left behind won't be easy.

I fear this review will be super short, because I found it difficult to find anything to dislike about this book. There were a few minor grammatical and punctuation errors, but overall, The Proving is a heartwarming, well-paced. Main character Mandy annoyed me a lot, what with her impatience and all, but such is nothing to said of Lewis and her writing, as I don’t feel it was the author poking her nose in and reminding me of the importance of patience (though such is a big deal in this book, which is a bit of a given considering Amish culture)—she’s not necessarily her characters.

SPEAKING OF CHARACTERS, there are two character POVs, which I didn’t much favor at first, but grew to appreciate the more I realized their connection. It’s a bit of foreshadowing and obviousness there, I’ve noticed, and the storyline is borderline predictable—okay, super predictable—but AGAIN, this is a feel-good genre, thus perhaps one of the few wherein anyone could do me any harm (so I’m sorry if you were hoping I’d be critical in this review, but Amish stories is my weak-in-the-knees category of all things anything—it’s my Kryptonite).

I want to read more of Beverly Lewis.

The way I felt reading her book reminded me of my preteen author favorite, Lois Duncan, and it’s nostalgic. Her next book is also Amish fiction, so a WOOT-WOOT there. The Proving started out slow, but once I reached about a hundred pages, I was hooked and didn’t want to put it down. ‘Twas a heartfelt story, and though I’ll deny it if you ask me later, I had ooey, gooey feelings while reading this and felt at peace, despite all the political snafu going on in the world right now.

Also, Lewis used “oodles” a few times. Um, yes??!!

I haven’t loved a book this much since The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.


What’s the last book you really loved?

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[…] Hair spiders, and empty drink bottles of water and soda line my floor. So much time had been spent in my desk chair that the backs of my thighs no longer ache when the seat waxes the hair from them because the hair is gone and replaced by sweat. My tall, lime green laundry basket from my high school days hasn’t been empty since the last week of October. My desk, which is usually messy, is the cleanest thing in my room whilst most other surfaces are collecting one-inch layers of dust. The last book I finished reading: The Proving. […]

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[…] Read (4): The Day the Angels Fell, All She Left Behind, The Missing, The Proving […]

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