Christian’s Hope
About the book:
Christian’s Hope (Herald Press, October 2016)
When Christian Hochstetler returns to the Amish after seven years in captivity, he finds that many things have shifted.
Captured as a child during the French and Indian War, Christian has spent much of his life among Native Americans, who cared for him and taught him their ways. Now that Christian is home, his father wants him to settle back into their predictable Amish life of farming, and Christian’s budding friendship with Orpha Rupp beckons him to stay as well.
Yet Christian feels restless, and he misses his adoptive Native American family—who raised him as their own son. When faced with a life-altering decision, will Christian choose the Amish identity that his father desires for him? Or will he depart from his family and faith community yet again?
Christian’s Hope tells the story of the younger brother of Joseph and son of Jacob, whom readers have come to love in the first two books in the Return to Northkill series. Based on actual events and written by a descendant of the Hochstetler family,Christian’s Hope brings the sweeping epic of the Return to Northkill series to a soul-stirring end.
About the author:
Ervin R. Stutzman is author of Jacob’s Choice,Joseph’s Dilemma, Tobias of the Amish, and Emma,A Widow Among the Amish. Born into an Amish home in Kalona, Iowa, Stutzman based the Return to Northkill series on the life of his ancestor, Jacob Hochstetler. He has been featured on TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are?
My thoughts
This book. I almost don’t know what to say. It’s an amazing piece of literature. I’ve not read anything quite like it. Based on real facts and events but with a spin all it’s own this book is truly a work of historical fiction but centered around the Amish of days gone by.
You’ve got a boy captured by Indians when he was very young and raised as one of them. But then he’s told he must go back to where he was captured from and become a white man again. Not just any white man, but an Amish white man. Those two lives are about as different as they come. Christian struggles with who he is and where to make his place in this world of his. He has an ally of sorts in his older brother who was captured with him but his father and step mother still perplex him.
Will he come to terms with who he is or will he forever be a part of two worlds?
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