Growing Up Amish

I first encountered this memoir while looking for a quilt rack in the heart of Northern Indiana Amish country with my mom. Walking through Shipshewana and seeing the legions of Amish, bicycling, buggy-ing, and strolling through the streets, I became more and more intrigued by the idea of their lives: no electricity, no cars, no conveniences of any kind. How did they make it work? So when I found Growing Up Amish staring at me from shelf-after-shelf of store-after-store, I thought I had found the answer to my myriad questions on Amish life.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. A better title would perhaps have been Leaving the Amish, as the author does time and again, but the memoir is unfortunately devoid of details about growing up Amish. The majority of the book in fact focuses on late adolescent and early adulthood years, with sparse offerings on how it was to grow up without such common comforts as central heating or lightbulbs. What chores were assigned from what age? How did the author perceive the "English" as a child? And once among them, which aspects of the larger world most excited - and most disappointed? 

On a separate note, I found the writing style choppy and distracting, with an abundance of incompletely developed thoughts, and therefore sentences, in nearly every chapter. I prefer richer writing, with more fully developed characters, and I had a hard time mustering much interest in the partially developed individuals in this book. That may also have to do with the undertones of bitterness that are present throughout the book, such that the author's assertion "despite harboring some resentment at the Amish in general for a number of years, I have come to terms with the aftermath..." (p. 269)  rang hollow to me. 

Overall, this memoir disappointed, as it only scratched the surface of what it could have been, had the author truly wished his reader's to understand how it was to grow up Amish as much as he wished them to understand why he chose to leave the Amish.