"Summer of Secrets" by Charlotte Hubbard, is your standard Amish book. It fills the pages with cliches and Amish catchphrases till you can't hardly stand it. It also relys on the fallback storyline of "the misplaced Amish kid". If the only thing you knew about Amish people was what you read you would think these people couldn't keep track of a kid to save their lives. It's like a massive Amish Easter egg hunt. And then to top it off, fictionwise, they always want to keep outsiders out of it, so they don't bother to look very hard. Now I don't know many Amish, but the ones I have met, I cannot imagine them any of them going "eh, no biggie, I'll get another one". No, can't see it.
This one starts with Tiffany meeting her biological family of Amish folks. Strangley, nobody is happy about it. What starts out as a side story, is the bishop is making Miriam, the mom, sell her building that her business is in. That story line takes over the book about 1/2 way through the book. Hubbard lets go of some of the Amish lingo and cliches and the book gets a lot better. I think she starts in too soon with the Tiffany storyline, because it starts before the reader can learn to care about any of the characters. We don't even know she is missing when she is found. I didn't especially like this one....trying too hard to be too Amish. I received this book for free from www.librarything.com.
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