Amish Romance Novels Provide Stolen Kisses, But Not “Women’s Rights”

Meet the hottest new women’s fiction subgenre: the Amish romance novel. Seeing as “the church has traditionally viewed fiction as distracting and deceitful,” the Wall Street Journal reports, Amish romances are largely written by non-Amish women, for non-Amish women. These so-called “bonnet books,” essentially, are romance novels for modern women who want to live vicariously through an Amish character’s modest romantic transgression against her religious community. So while the books routinely defy Amish sensibilities in plot—they generally involve “an Amish character who falls for an outsider”—they remain extremely sexually conservative.  In one popular book, Cindy Woodsmall’s “When the Heart Cries,” the forbidden couple “actually kiss a couple of times in 326 pages.”

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