Author: Dale
Cramer
Review: The
book tells the story of an Amish family that emigrates to Mexico in the 1920s.
After Caleb Bender, and four other Amish men, are arrested for not sending
their children to an English school full
time their children are taken away to a state home. After their release Caleb
finds property for sale in Mexico and takes his family there to start an Amish colony.
The book covers their first year and the problems and troubles encountered.
If you enjoy books by Beverly Lewis you will
like this offering.
I give it five stars and would recommend the
author as a writer to watch for and to read.
I picked up the book from kindlebuffet.com.
ISBN: 9780764208386
Page
Count: 359
Quick
Review: 5 out 5 stars –
Why I
Read this Title: found it on Kindlebuffet.com and thought why not?
Synopsis: An Amish settlement in Ohio has run afoul of a
law requiring their children to attend public school. Caleb Bender and his
neighbors are arrested for neglect, with the state ordering the children be
placed in an institution. Among them are Caleb's teenage daughter, Rachel, and
the boy she has her eye on, Jake Weaver. Romance blooms between the two when
Rachel helps Jake escape the children's home.
Searching for a place to relocate his family where
no such laws apply, Caleb learns there's inexpensive land for sale in Mexico, a
place called Paradise Valley. Despite rumors of instability in the wake of the
Mexican revolution, the Amish community decides this is their answer. Since it
was Caleb's idea, he and his family will be the pioneers. They will send for
the others once he's established a foothold and assessed the situation. Caleb's
daughters are thrown into turmoil. Rachel doesn't want to leave Jake. Her
sister, Emma, who has been courting Levi Mullet, fears her dreams of marriage
will be dashed. Miriam has never had a beau and is acutely aware there will be
no prospects in Mexico.
Once there, they meet Domingo, a young man and guide
who takes a liking to Miriam, something her father would never approve. While
Paradise Valley is everything they'd hoped it would be, it isn't long before
the bandits start giving them trouble, threatening to upset the fledgling Amish
settlement, even putting their lives in danger. Thankfully no one has been
harmed so far, anyway.
Author
Information: Dale
Cramer was the second of four children born to a runaway Amishman turned
soldier and a south Georgia sharecropper’s daughter. His formative years were
divided between far-flung military bases, but he inherited his mother’s sense
of place—
"I
remember knee-deep snow in the Maryland woods, chasing horned toads in El Paso,
playing soccer in Mainz, and the way German shopkeepers and hausfraus fussed
over us kids. But when I picture that sun-rippled macadam road leading up to my
granparents’ house in Georgia I can still feel the anticipation. That was
home."
True to
his Amish ancestry, Dale skipped college and went to work with his hands,
earning a living as an electrician, but he had early acquired the habit of
reading widely and voraciously. The thought was never far from his mind that
someday he would like to write books. In 1975 he married his childhood friend,
Pam Crowe, and in the early years of their marriage the two of them enjoyed
traveling, camping, water skiing, scuba-diving, snow skiing and flying
sailplanes. They eventually bought a piece of land and built a home out in the
country south of Atlanta. In 1990 their first child, Ty, was born. Dusty
arrived two years later. Unlike their parents (Pam was an Army brat as well) Ty
and Dusty have lived in the same place all their lives.
At the
age of forty, with two toddlers in the house, Dale began to ask deeper
questions of himself. He’d attended church all his life but never felt a real
sense of God’s presence. After months of study and meditation he began to feel
that he was being called to do something, but he had no idea what it was. He
finally came to understand that genuine commitment means no reservations, that
the answer to the question ‘Will you do it?’ is not ‘What is it?’ The only
acceptable response is ‘Yes—whatever the question, the answer is yes.’ That
deeper level of commitment brought a very real sense of God’s presence and a
sense of direction in Dale’s life, though he still did not know the direction.
After
keeping the boys in daycare for a year Pam and Dale decided to make whatever
sacrifices were necessary to provide a full-time home. The decision altered
their lives in ways neither of them could have anticipated when Dale drew the
short straw and became a stay-at-home dad—
"A
baby is a lot like an old truck— it leaks and makes weird noises. Clean up the
mess, top off the fluids, and the noises usually stop."
He took
on small construction projects at night to help make ends meet— "and to
preserve the remainder of my sanity," he says. While building an office in
the basement of a communications consultant, a debate over labor/management
relations turned into an article on mutualism which found its way into an
international business magazine. It was Dale’s first published article, and he
liked the feel of it. He bought books, studied technique, and began
participating in an online writers’ forum, writing during the boys’ naps and
after they went to bed at night. Before long he was publishing short stories in
literary magazines and thinking about writing a book.
Three
storylines vied for Dale’s attention when he finally decided to write a novel.
His first two choices were commercially viable secular stories, and a distant
third appeared to be some kind of Christian saga about a broken-down biker. The
process of determining which novel to write was settled by a remarkable
encounter with his youngest son, a lost set of keys, and God.* His sense of
direction was suddenly clarified. In 1997, Dale began work on Sutter’s Cross,
which was eventually published in 2003.
His
second novel, Bad Ground (July 2004), while it is not autobiographical,
contains a great deal of material drawn from his own experience as a
construction electrician. The industrial setting is based on a real water
treatment plant on the southside of Atlanta. One of the main characters, who
has been
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