CHRISTMAS GRACE

A disgraced Amish woman seeks redemption and love in this lively romance.

When single Grace Miller gets pregnant—and by an Englischer, no less, who promised to get baptized but then abandoned her and joined the military—she’s shunned by her Indiana Amish congregation and exiled by her censorious dad to the Amish community of Walnut Ridge, Kentucky. There, her grim spinster Aunt Tess installs her by herself in a “sinner’s shack,” a ramshackle cabin on a remote hillside; seven months pregnant, Grace huddles in loneliness and penury but has the grit to fight off a pack of wild dogs with a broken broom handle. Fortunately, Walnut Ridge has a friendlier, less judgmental group of Amish, and a bunch of women help her out with provisions, light employment, and companionship. Even friendlier is Cullen Graber, a tall, handsome blacksmith with big biceps and a backstory of tragic love that makes him sympathetic to Grace’s plight when he’s not hypnotized by her blue eyes and saucy bare feet. Cullen fixes up Grace’s cabin; she reciprocates with home-cooked meals; and the two talk through problems of faith and forgiveness. Meanwhile, she fends off the attentions of Freeman Hilty, the loathsome son of the man who owns the cabin, who tries to bully her into marriage by threatening to evict her. With Christmas and her delivery date looming, Grace’s burgeoning love for the stalwart and obviously smitten Cullen starts to overcome her trust issues—whereupon the father of her child shows up, asking her to take him back. Steele sets her yarn against a richly textured view of Amish life, full of chores and quilting bees and knotty wrestling with religious values. It’s a warm, close-knit community, but Steele’s evocative prose also brings out a claustrophobic side that can turn on a dime to cold, unfeeling ostracism. (“Eyes darted past her, and bodies slid away when she went to take a seat on the lonely bench in the corner. Her friends and family avoided her as if she were poison ivy and her sins catching.”) Grace is an energetic hero, and Steele deftly conveys her smoldering Amish eroticism—“the way his body strained and twisted sent another surge of heat over her”—as it grows in intensity by virtue of its being so buttoned up.

An entertaining love story about a fallen woman who doesn’t stay down.