Plain and Fancy by Wanda Brunstetter

Okay, I confess that I'm a frugal book hoarder.

So I have access to a certain lending library these days. And for the most part it's all Danielle Steele and James Patterson, neither of which intrigue me too much (no offense, just not my thing).

But when I spied with my little eye Plain and Fancy by Wanda Brunstetter, I couldn't resist.

SPOILERS BELOW

First let me say that as an author, Wanda Brunstetter is lapping me. She's dancing circles on my shallow grave, okay? I have one book out, and almost nobody read it. Wanda has dozens of books out and tons of fans. She has trailers for her books, with live actors in them. They're all really professionally done. Wanda is on the ball as an author. So kudos to her, and please keep that in mind as I give my honest and spoilery review below.

This was my first time reading a book about Amish people, so I didn't know what to expect. But I saw that there are many books in this genre. And if you're interested in experimenting with Amish books, I would recommend Happily Ever Amish, by Shelley Shepard Gray, instead.   I'm giving Plain and Fancy 2 stars.  I found it disappointing.

The best thing about this book is that I learned a little about the Amish. I did some research on their culture. It made me want to make a shoo-fly pie.

Plain and Fancy is about a girl named Laura, the daughter of an attorney from Minneapolis, who goes to interior design college in Lancaster Pennsylvania. Why? Because she apparently didn't get accepted at a real design college. That's the only explanation I can think of.

In the book it says it's because she's fascinated by the Amish and their home decoration aesthetic. So in other words, she's unfamiliar with them. Because their decoration aesthetic is that it's a sin to decorate things.

No, really, Laura is too dumb to survive outside the womb. And also she's quite a rotten human being, shallow, just plain spoiled, dishonest, lazy, really no redeeming qualities at all.

The Amish guy who falls for her must be thinking with his little head, the same way non-Amish guys so often do. That's ultimately why I'm panning this book. Because instead of giving us real people, Brunstetter has made everyone mostly rather two-dimensional. The Amish people are a bit more human, and the men. But the women, and especially the "English" women, are cartoon baddies. Laura's mother is even worse than Laura, who is fully loathsome.

It seems to me that if Brunstetter had more confidence in her own beliefs, she could make the villains (the secular women) a bit more human and likeable. Having the secular lifestyle also be okay as a choice, not solely the domain of garbage people like Laura and her mother, would have taken this book to the next level. 

Because the Amish lifestyle has nothing to apologize for and plenty to praise. I knew there was no chance Eli would move to Minnesota with her to work at Best Buy. I was sure this would end with Laura in a bonnet. There's a reason she didn't go to design school in New York, where design schools are located.

But no, in this book English disgusting, Amish perfect. Laura's mother has not one redeeming quality, nor does Laura. Laura's father is somewhat sympathetic because he is seen as a victim of his selfish, materialistic wife.  Laura's mother spends all her time at "charity" functions that may or may not benefit anyone but herself and her need to socialize, and greatly inconvenience Laura's father.

It's also insta-love. I'm not a romance reader. But I really don't get any reason why Laura and Eli want to be together other than physical attraction which happened immediately, and so this book could have a woman leave the fancy life behind and find true happiness in fundamentalist patriarchy.

And don't get me wrong; I'm fine with the Amish community. We share many values in common. I have a rather modest lifestyle and do many things by hand. The most-likeable person in this book is the Amish mother-in-law to be, who is cast as something of a shrew for not accepting Laura -- who should absolutely not be accepted. 

Because Laura is faking everything in order to get what she wants. She is a phony. She has no respect for the Amish or anyone else. She only wants what she wants.

Laura meets her future husband, Eli Yoder, at the Amish market where he's selling the bird houses he makes. He stops her from taking a picture of some Amish children who are passing by, explaining that in their culture, they don't like to be photographed.

That's a depressing meet-cute for so many reasons. First of all it shows how little Laura knows about the Amish, not even very basic things like not wanting to be photographed. Also there's nothing really cute about it. Also she should already know not to take pictures of random children she doesn't know even if they aren't Amish.

But as I said, she's truly and deeply awful. Eventually of course they do get married, because this is a romance book. And at first I intended to not rate this book, only review it, because I'm not the intended reader. I don't really read romance novels. And I'm not a conservative Christian, which is I believe the intended reader.  I suspect this book is meant for Evangelical women with children who wish they never had to step foot in another Costco -- and I can totally relate.

But even grading on the curve, I was so disappointed. Because -- and here's the spoiler -- the ending could have been really great, and it wasn't.

There was an opportunity for Eli's sister to help Laura to a true Christian conversion. But the moment wasn't given time to breathe inside the narrative. Laura first of all was made such a cartoon "English" woman, so spoiled and useless, that there really wasn't space for her to have a proper character arc and blossom into a decent Amish woman. Brunstetter didn't allow for that in the character development.

Brunstetter all but wrote Laura's mother as Hilary Clinton. The underlying message that secular women have zero redeeming qualities is abundantly clear throughout this book.

Laura has a child with Down's syndrome and bolts from her marriage to Eli and back to her wealthy parents in Minnesota, after previously telling them to screw off, she's joining the Amish. Then Eli's sister goes to bring her back and convince her that it's okay, Eli wants her back, come take care of the baby.

Eli's sister makes the point that it says in the Bible it's okay if a woman doesn't have faith, as long as her husband does and she follows him. And Laura is surprised to hear that the Amish will accept her even knowing full well she's a phony, which of course they always did because DUH. Eli was the only one that ever liked her.

So for me, not allowing the moment of Christian conversion to really fall into place, after it was so beautifully set up by the birth of their disabled child -- which is low-key blamed on Laura's constant under-eating in an attempt to stay thin because of her vanity -- ruined the whole book for me. She could really have pondered that feeling of acceptance by the sister that she had stayed with before they got married, or what it would mean to be inside that marriage and community. But Laura's just shallow and dumb. So that isn't how she processes it.

Laura, daughter of an attorney, isn't deep enough to grasp that what she's being told is that as a woman, nobody cares what you think anyway. You just have to show up and do as you're told. She takes it as them being fine with whatever she wants to do, as long as she goes back and takes care of the baby. Her big hot Yoder still wants her, knows she's a phony and is okay with it, isn't mad that she ran.  So she's happy to be a fake Christian and get her man, as long as she gets to wear the neato costume.  For me, that's a trainwreck of an ending, disguised as happily ever after.

Eli's mother is right that Laura doesn't have what it takes to raise a special-needs child in the Amish community. Laura doesn't have what it takes to live among "the quiet people of the land." She won't last with being routinely humiliated at the dinner table by Eli's father when the sex isn't good anymore, when the shine wears off the relationship. She'll run again later.

Ultimately I can't recommend this book because the characters are so two-dimensional. I'm only on the second chapter of Happily Ever Amish and it's worlds better. The Amish people are actually humans with normal, relatable thought process albeit from a different culture. Plain and Fancy reads like a really strange social submission fetish.

The best characters in Plain and Fancy are Eli's mother and sister. But Laura and her mother are cringeable. At one point when Laura discovers she's pregnant, a college friend mentions that she could get an abortion because she's in such distress. Laura feels like not doing so is "teaching her a lesson," as though that girl GAF. She doesn't. And you haven't taught her anything except that you don't appreciate friends. She doesn't get a commission on abortions.

Really, think about it. Any girl who hears from her college roommate that she's run off to join the Amish, is pregnant and in distress, and doesn't try to talk to her about other options that she has, is a bit of a butthole.

Because for some portion of this book Laura's family didn't even know how to find her if they wanted to. That's messed up. Because you know what? The key word in "Amish people" is "people." They're humans with human problems. You can't just be jumping into a buggy with the next hot Yoder that rolls up any more than you would a strange man's car.

No, seriously. Read Women Talking if you don't think men in such communities are capable of any kind of sexual violence. They totally are. Google "Amish crime" and let your eyeballs pop out. Many Amish men expect to do whatever they want to women, any old time. They might be the best guys ever. Or they might not. But the choice is entirely their own.

And frankly, Eli was a jerk in the book. I don't get what she liked about him other than the same thing he liked about her. They wanted to do the nasty. And he's Amish. So they had to get married first, which was a terrible idea. Read Happily Ever Amish instead.