This Amish retelling of Jane Austen's classic was just released on March 1st.
After having read a few other modern retellings of Jane Austen classics, I'm so glad to have finally read one that stayed true to Austen's original characters. The author did a wonderful job of bringing the classic romance to Amish Pennsylvania, mixing in some of the local Pennsylvania Dutch language and customs. Although Eleanor and Marianne's first names remain the same, some of the names change, most notably Colonel Brandon becomes a pastor, Christian Bechlder. As this was written by a Christian fiction author, and since it is set in Amish country, God and the Bible is mentioned heavily, so this book should be very popular with readers of Christian fiction but may not appeal to secular audiences. All in all, I definitely recommend this book for those hoping to read a different interpretation of Austen's Sense and Sensibility without being so modern that the characters no longer resemble the original ones.
For those unfamiliar with the original classic, Sense and Sensibility is the story of the three Detweiler sisters (Dashwood in the original), whose father has just died and whose home and farm are now the property of their older half-brother whose promise to take care of his step-mom and three younger sisters is broken. The Detweiler women must relocate to another Amish community and start a sewing business to provide for themselves. Meanwhile possible suitors appear for both of the elder sisters, but while one guards her heart by being proper and demure, the other loses both her heart and her head to a man who breaks it all too easily.
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