Amazon.com description: Product Description: Ethan is a young Amish boy with major decisions to make. He has to decide whether to join the church or to leave. He wants to further his education which is impossible among the Amish. Ethan is also becoming more and more disillusioned with the closed society which has mis-shaped his best friend, Amos, who ends up in jail. Society has also shunned his Uncle Walter now hiding out in his mother's house. However, leaving would not only mean giving up his family and its security, but also moving away from his beautiful fiancee, Elizabeth, who teaches in the local Amish school. Ethan is helped by his unconventional Uncle Eli, an Amish man from Ontario, who drives a car and fancies himself a brilliant detective.

GROWING UP AMISH presents accurate accounts of Amish life ceremonies; a wedding, a funeral, and a barn raising. Yet, it is the first novel to look behind the idyllic picture painted by fiction aboput the Amish to show a troubled world where beatings, jealousy and deceit occur just as they do in the greater world outside. In a week which includes a leap from a car, a suicide, a shooting and a character leaping in a grave, Ethan discovers himself and his relationship to his people. END