Premarital sex is verboten.So what is their appeal to modern readers? Remember when Kelly McGillis' modest Amish beauty enraptured Harrison Ford's homicide detective in the 1985 hit Witness? His tough contemporary cop, who pretended to be Amish to protect the widow Rachel Lapp and her young son, saw a whole new world when he lived amid the closed community of barn-raisers and farmers.With Amish inspirationals, which are shelved under "religious fiction" in bookstores like Barnes amp Noble, "readers get to peer inside the Amish community, and it is not like our own community," says McDaniel College English professor Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel.
Traditional courtship rituals include "Sunday evening singing" group gatherings, where boys and girls can meet. Children are taught in one-room schoolhouses, and education ends in the eighth grade. They marry among their own faith the women wear bonnets and modest, drab clothing, the men wear brimmed hats and grow their beards. They are a religious, Christian-based farming community that shuns most modern conveniences such as phones and TVs, and they travel by horse and buggy. In our sex-soaked society, nothing seems to inflame the imagination quite like the chaste.In popular series such as Beverly Lewis' Seasons of Grace, Wanda Brunstetter's Indiana Cousins and Cindy Woodsmall's Sisters of the Quilt,the Amish fall in love while grappling with religious taboos and forbidden temptations.And it all happens in über-quaint settings brimming with hand-sewn quilts, horse-drawn buggies and made-from-scratch Pennsylvania Dutch specialties such as shoofly pie."It's a huge, huge, huge trend," says romance blogger Sarah Wendell, co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels.Who are the Amish? In a 21st-century world, the strictest among them live a 19th-century lifestyle. When she's not caring for her large family, reading and writing are her favorite pastimes.For many readers today, it's all about the bonnet. Emma was educated in local schools, and once taught in an Amish schoolhouse much like the one at Seven Poplars. Fortunate enough to be born into a family of strong faith, she grew up on a dairy farm, surrounded by loving parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Emma Miller lives quietly in her old farmhouse in rural Delaware amid fertile fields and lush woodlands.
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