Good Amish book. ( )

Elizabeth Younts has the stories her mammi told her and written a biography of what it was like to grow up poor and Amish during the Depression. I found myself coming back to this book, wanting to see how the family was faring. I thoroughly enjoyed this book! ( )

Seasons is a book of memories of an Amish grandmother by her granddaughter. It is a fast read, only 173 pages long. The grandmother grew up an Amish family that was already poor but then the Depression came and things got worse.

Liddy usually had no shoes, not even in the winter and wore coats that didn't fit. She yearned for clothes that would keep her warm, never mind what they looked like. She wore feed sack dresses. That reminded me of my mother. Even though she doesn't mention it, the feed sacks did have pretty flower prints. I wore them when I was a toddler in the 1950s.

Also, she talks about the shortage of food. Here she had a little less than my mother's family had to eat as they were a farming family and much more than my father's family who grew up in town.

The best part of the book is the relationships between the family members. They had trials of sorrow and poverty but that was common to non-Amish families. What made their family different was less reliance on the law to protect them and having help from the Amish community.
I enjoyed this little book, I did not learn that much about the Amish or more about the Depression but I learned more about the struggle to be the oldest in the family when you have lost your mother.

I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories about families. ( )

This is obviously a memoir written in order to preserve an Amish grandmother's memories of her formative years growing up in the Depression. It's not not great writing, nor is it nearly complete enough for reading by those outside faith and family. However, I did think it was interesting to see the Depression and World War II in Delaware through the eyes of an Amish girl who was already poor before the Depression hit and see how her family, and her community, struggled to keep everyone going. It is not overwhelmingly religious, which helps, but it gives a little bit of a view into the Amish religion. I wanted to know lots more about the Amish religion, how it views issues other than those which happened during Lydie's formative years to her and her family, and how those in Delaware outside the Amish weathered the Depression and the War. So, the final review is that it's interesting but incomplete. ( )