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Sarah Price, popular author of Amish fiction, is also a contributor to the One series, which is regularly posted about on this blog. Her story, The Power of Faith, is currently available for ONLY 99 Cents with author proceeds going to a great cause. You can get it here: http://goo.gl/xhE9w

Winterberries and Apple Blossoms: Reflections and Flavors of a Mennonite Year by Nan Forler illustrated with paintings by Peter Etril Snyder (Tundra Books, 2011)  takes the reader month by month through a calendar year in an Old Order Mennonite girl’s life.   Old Order Mennonites are a religious community that live in and around the Waterloo region in southern Ontario.  Similar to the Amish, they live simple lives with very few modern conveniences.  They do not own cars nor computers or televisions.  They work on farms, making their living on what they grow and sell.

Naomi is the young girl from whose perspective the reader views her world.  Each month is written about in poems.  For example, January opens with a poem called “The Quilting Bee.”

Matilda Martin and Edna Bauman
Mam and Lucinda and me –
my first time quilting with the women.
Noisy greetings as we settle in around the quilt frame,
then silence as each begins.

A lovely painting of Naomi stitching amongst the women is depicted on the facing page. And so the months go, poem by poem, Naomi’s life unfolding before the reader. A Mennonite girl’s life is clearly different from a boy’s — in May’s poem “The Bicycle” for example, we see Naomi covertly attempting to ride her brother’s bike and suffering for it (she crashes, her skirt getting caught in the greasy chains) but two months later in “The Ball Game” we see Naomi whack the baseball well past the older boy’s reach even though they had moved in field expecting her to be a weak hitter.

I liked the pacing in this book. The poems are slow and thoughtful like the kind of lives these children live in their pastoral farm communities. And the paintings that depict the life are easily as bucolic and delightful as the poems.  And as an added bonus, there are recipes at the back of the book, one for each month celebrating the seasonal culinary delights of the community.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Elaine at Wild Rose Reader.

David’s Trip to Paraguay: The Land of Amazing Colours by Miriam Rudolph (CMU Press, 2011) is a recently published children’s book that tells the story of young David who recounts a long and arduous journey from a small southern Manitoba farm to the Chaco region of Paraguay in 1927.   A bilingual book — text is in German and in English –  the book is also colorfully illustrated with Rudolph’s vibrant images, cleverly ‘stitched’ as it were, by all the various modes of transport David takes to get to his final destination.  My daughter enjoyed connecting each illustrated page to the previous one by finding the travel image — whether railroad, or boat — unique to both.  In the front of the book, the entire set of travel images are united in a long band showing the journey.

How did David come to take this trip?  In 1927, a group of Mennonites in southern Manitoba, disheartened by the province’s ruling against the presence of German schools in certain immigrant communities like theirs, left Canada for the remote Chaco area in Paraguay.  David’s parents were of these Mennonites.  This long trip left a deep impression on a young boy, and later David would recount his memories of this trip to his grandchildren, one of them, being the author and illustrator of this book, Miriam Rudolph.

My daughter and I enjoyed reading this colorful book together, and maybe, some day she can read it with her Oma in German!

Katy's best friend Shelby will be staying with Katy all summer! Katy and Shelby have lots of fun things planned, like teaching Shelby how to quilt, training Katy's horses, eating ice cream as much as they can. But when Katy's Aunt Rebecca turns seriously ill, Katy's plans for the summer, and possibly the school year change drastically. Plus, Katy need to figure out her feelings for Bryce, Jonathan (a visitor from another Mennonite sect, and Caleb. What will Katy choose? To read more of my review, click here.