The Bridge of Peace tells us the story of Lena Kauffman, an old order Amish school teacher. Lena has had to deal with the stares and hurtful comments about her appearance. She has a large noticeable birthmark on her cheek. In her class this term, she has a disruptive student who will not listen to her. Parents are complaining and questioning her ability to control her class and also the decisions she makes about the students. This book also tells us about other friends and neighbors in the community. Grey Graber and his wife Elsie are having their own problems, but are trying to keep others from learning about their private life. They have a son who may be in Lena's classroom in the next term, but even this is causing problems for Grey and Elsie. Tragedy strikes and things will change for these characters. There are also other people in this story, such as Cara and her daughter Lori who have moved from New York to join the Amish community, Ada who is a widow and along with Cara, is trying to get a business going to support herself and Cara and Lori too. The Blank family have a lot of influence with the school board and their sons Peter and Dwayne cause a lot of troubles for Lena. Dwayne in particular is real bad news.
If you have a sensitive nature and don't like cruelty toward animals or humans, then you should be cautioned about this book. Some of what occurs in this book is rather upsetting and not the usual stuff I read in Amish Christian type stories. Perhaps the author felt that such strong descriptions were necessary to make her point about how mentally ill some people can be, while those closest to them may not even notice or want any help for their family member. One other thing that I found to be irritatiing was finding the list of characters at the end of the book, rather then at the beginning. Since I hadn't read the first book in this series, it took awhile for me to figure out who everyone was and what motivated some of them. I'm sorry that I didn't look through the whole book first, before reading it. That may have helped me to understand some of the characters a little easier. Other then the criticisms that I offered, I did enjoy the book very much.
If you would like to read the first chapter, please follow this link.
I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review
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