Unbreakable

Mehl continues her Road to Kingdom series, about a Mennonite community in Kansas, with a tale of a testing of faith. The action gets going quickly when young Mennonite Hope Kauffman is run off the road in her buggy, one in a string of incidents of harassment targeting religious people and churches in the area. As trouble escalates, the Mennonite community is torn between adherents of the religion’s teaching of nonviolence and advocates of a more vigorous response that includes armed patrols. Hope lives the dilemma, torn between her gentle fiancé Ebbie and attractive Jonathon Wiese, who organizes the patrols. Mehl has strengths: her premise is solid, she delivers on romantic tension and the physical attraction that can only be implied in Christian fiction, and the ending is satisfactory. Her dialogue could use work (“You must have some unresolved issues about Jonathon,” one of Hope’s Mennonite friends says), too many coincidences mar the suspense, and the eating-good-food narrative convention of Amish and Mennonite novels is overdone. But those who like gentle reads will enjoy this suspenseful variation on that theme. (Feb.)