Huckleberry Summer

by Jennifer Beckstrand

June 3, 2014 · Zebra

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Syaffolee. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Inspirational Romance category.

Here is Syaffolee's review:

Some caveats before I begin with the actual review: I have never read an inspirational romance before, let alone an Amish inspirational romance, so it is without any doubt that I am completely unfamiliar with this subgenre’s tropes and conventions. Also, aside from that one time when I was seven my uncle took me to this place in Ohio where some nice Amish ladies made some delicious fruit cobblers, I lack the background to vouch for the authenticity of the Amish culture or spiritual beliefs depicted in this novel. I chose to review this book because I wanted to try something completely different. And the cover which jammed two disparate things together–an Amish lady and a gigantic fluffy dog–was such a clunker that I thought for sure there might be something unusual within its pages.

As Huckleberry Summer opens, we meet the Helmuths, an elderly Amish couple bent on matchmaking all of their grandchildren. In this installment of the Huckleberry series, their sights are fixated on their grandson Aden, a vegetarian and environmental activist who has been arrested three times. It doesn’t matter that he’s been arrested for tree hugging. It’s the run-ins with the authorities that have the rest of the Amish community shaking their heads and gossiping about him, branding him a Bad Boy. The Helmuths think that they can match Aden up with the local Good Girl, Lily Eicher, who tries to follow all the rules to stay safe. The elderly couple concocts a scheme to bring the two young people together by hiring Lily to do chores around their house while Aden is visiting them.

At first, Lily is leery of Aden because of her father’s directive to avoid the supposed troublemaker and his gigantic dog Pilot due to her childhood trauma with another dog. But after seeing Aden’s good nature and his friendly interactions with others, she eventually warms to him and they start secretly courting, even though Lily is still seeing Tyler, the bishop’s son, whom her father explicitly endorses as a match for her. Despite Aden’s attempts at gaining her father’s approval, Lily’s father adamantly rejects his efforts. And after an incident where Lily tries to prove she’s more daring than what others think of her and fails, Aden is shunned and Lily meekly accepts Tyler’s proposal of marriage to keep her father happy. Of course, Aden and Lily do eventually end up together, but the way they went about it made me sorry for Tyler (although not too sorry since he was obvious sequel bait) and exasperated for the featured couple.

I liked the banter between Lily and Aden in the first half of the novel even if it seemed predictable and they were surrounded by stock characters and situations. But the second half of the novel pretty much went downhill from there, plot-wise, character-wise, and patience-wise. When things go south and Aden gets punished because Lily fails to own up to her own poor judgement, he welcomes the punishment like a martyr even though it’s obvious to the reader and the other characters that he doesn’t deserve it.

Aden’s annoying angst, however, is nothing compared to Lily’s spinelessness when something bad happens and she doesn’t want to face the consequences. The only person who even remotely chastises her for her behavior is her sister and even then, she is only given the occasional cold shoulder. To keep herself safe, she retreats to following all of her father’s orders and stringing poor Tyler along until almost literally the last minute. And when she does ask Aden to forgive her for her lapse in judgement and abysmal behavior, there is no grovel, no serious deep discussions, almost no consequences aside from getting kicked out of her father’s house. Everyone keeps telling her what a Good Girl she is and that nothing is her fault.

What was frustrating for me was Lily’s lack of believable character growth. It doesn’t matter what the impetus for that character growth is or whether I believe in the spiritual and philosophical premise of the genre. What does matter is whether or not the author has convinced me that the character grew within the context of this particular story. I don’t think Lily has changed, even if Aden thinks she has because she’s gotten the courage to kiss him in front of other people. Lily has only ever wanted to gain the approval of the main man in her life. Before, it had been her father. And at the end, she has merely switched her allegiance to Aden. There is at no point in the story where she does anything solely for herself or for an ideal.

Of course, one can’t help think that maybe this is one of those “It’s me, not you” things. Perhaps this is exactly what Amish romances are supposed to be like and I’m just not getting it. Maybe there’s a disconnect between what I thought the characters would logically do and how Amish characters, as a trope, behave. Aside from Lily’s father who acted like a two-dimensional antagonist with his unrelenting disapproval of Aden, I felt that a number of the characters were improbably nice. Is it typical for characters in an inspirational romance to act like complete paragons to set an example for the reader? I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is that the characters didn’t feel quite real to me. Even if the characters are Amish, they are still supposed to be human and I would have expected far more tension and uneasiness between them, even if they were all smiling at each other.