The Collection
Amanda Farmer's Books
If You Leave This Farm: The Dream Is Destroyed - Paperback
As a teenage Mennonite girl, Amanda lives with her close-knit family in south central Pennsylvania. Life revolves around hard work, faith, and commitment to the family. She doesnt question the daily routine; its the only life shes known. Her father talks about buying a farm out west with a lot of land in one block. Not only will the family farm there together, but the parents hope to begin a new Mennonite community. To a fifteen-year-old girl, this move begins as an exciting adventure.
In If You leave this Farm, Amanda shares the story of her familys relocation to Minnesota and the subsequent challenges they face as farmers, a family, and Mennonites. She tells how the first crop year was a huge failure and her father alone makes the decision to expand the new dairy in an attempt to recoup the losses. This memoir chronicles the years of struggle as Amanda and her younger brother Joseph seek to escape their fathers suffocating and controlling behavior.
Intermingled with the struggle on the farm is the effort to become an accepted member of the Minnesota Mennonite community. The change in Amandas fathers behavior and attitude during the first years in Minnesota alienates him and his family from others of the same faith. She shares a mix of emotions as she wrestles with the shame of her familys standing with the Mennonites and the crushing weight of constant submission to her fathers misguided use of his God-given authority.
No Longer a Child of Promise - Paperback
This sequel to If You Leave This Farm chronicles the life adventures of this young Mennonite lady who, after choosing to walk away from her fathers farm at age 29, is now free to make her own choices as an adult. Amanda shares the joy of discovering the world away from the farm, of falling in love, and about her decision to eventually leave the Mennonite church. But that freedom and joy is tainted by the continuing intertwined and overpowering conflicts that result from unspoken and unresolved expectations in her family of origin.
With an engaging style, Amanda provides an honest glimpse into her roller coaster journey of hope and love alternating with pain, hurt and bitterness as a result of misplaced familial values, favoritism, and the effect of the ultimate rejection disinheritance by her parents.
No Longer a Child of Promise vividly portrays the struggle in one womans heart to grasp the meaning of forgiveness, to experience triumph and acceptance in her personal journey, and to eventually release the all-consuming pain of rejection in her heart to God.
Farewell To A Thousand Acres
This is the third book in a trilogy presenting the challenges of life on a 1280 acre farm after moving to Minnesota to farm together as a family in the early 1970s.
This storyline begins just a few short years after the death of both the patriarch and matriarch who leave the whole farm to the eldest son. Divorce, greed, and anger soon lead to poor decisions by Paul.
He seeks comfort, love, and acceptance online in various dating chat rooms. The result is Paul is soon involved in an online romance that he is convinced is legitimate and fulfills all his needs. Though everyone else can see the red flags, he cannot.
This true real-life account brings in not only the struggles of divorce and the splitting of a valuable estate as the result of that, but also the very skewed right-wing beliefs that result in an isolated paranoid family.
Finally, the story tracks the deteriorating behavior and situation of Paul who becomes more and more deeply involved in overseas romance scams, money laundering schemes, and IRS troubles as he attempts to hide what money he has left.
Legacy Of A Thousand Acres
This real-life account told through the eyes of a young Mennonite lady is primarily a pre-cautionary tale of how one father’s dream to be connected in a farming business relationship with his children throughout life goes terribly awry. This is due to the inability of the patriarchal father to erect appropriate boundaries and consider the physical and emotional needs of all those involved.
This eventually leads to the worst financial outcome possible for the son who is entrusted with preserving the legacy of a 1280 acre farm that he takes over, but for which he is woefully unprepared psychologically, spiritually, or emotionally.
This is a compilation of If You Leave This Farm, The Dream Is Destroyed, and Farewell To A Thousand Acres in one volume.
Once An Insider, Now Without A Church Home
This is the story of one couple's faith crisis after realizing the church they have spent 25 years serving as leaders in has made subtle but profound changes over the years. It is their journey from being trusting followers of Jesus to questioning everything about their faith.
Who is really following the Bible? Who is really interpreting the Bible correctly?
This is a personal memoir that follows the changes in the American Evangelical Church as it becomes more popular to embrace Calvinism, Authoritarianism, Complementarianism, and Covenants and the effect this can have on one's faith.
The story illustrates the pain of going from being an accepted member of a church - from being on the inside - to realizing that the leadership desires that you leave the fellowship.
Don't Cry Over Spilled Dr. Pepper
How ironic can life be? I take my cat, who has been peeing all over my house, to the vet in frustration. As I stand to leave, I realize the vet's cat has peed all over my coat.
Life with pets and in the country can have its "really?" moments. The author shares experiences through short stories from their everyday life as they grow older and struggle to meet the challenges of spring, summer, and winter in cold Minnesota.
Sometimes, knowing that we aren’t the only ones whose life journey has trials and tribulations makes our own journey tolerable and sometimes even laughable.
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“Judge, 24th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards.” For No Longer A Child of PromiseThere are a number of messages contained in this memoir as the author shares her experiences when she leaves the family farm against her parents’ wishes. Her journey into independence is full of entanglements with parents and siblings, co-workers and friends. She finds herself disinherited by her father yet she frequently misses him and even nurses him in his final years. As a hospital nurse, the author also is in the role of nurturing on many levels. The memoir uses a wide variety of “voices” to chronicle her life after the family and farm – letters, emails, legal documents, quotes, phone messages, poems, prayers, wills, songs and much more. These variations in narrative provide the reader with refreshing breaks from a single voice. And since the author tells her story in first person present tense, these other “voices” provide a more traditional narrative contrast. There are good anecdotes, rich in dialogue, that help build character and depth. The fammily involvement extends in many unexpected directions, including fraud and embezzlement. The issue of trust, however, underlies all of the memoir.
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