Annie Mae Knepp didn't expect to wait tables at a roadside cafe. However, her father has started up a new, controversial branch of Plain folks, and she bravely decided to go her own way - which meant staying in the community where she'd been raised. The traditional Amish have opened their doors to her and her younger sister and she's taken the job offered by Miriam Hooley.

BREATH OF SPRING starts on a busy spring morning as the menfolk come to get hot food, the new preacher among them. Adam Wagler, a carpenter and builder, notices Annie Mae having difficulty reading the menu and gives her a pair of reading glasses. She's always known her sight wasn't the best, but her father thought she didn't need to focus in order to cook and keep house. Now the letters jump into clarity. What else will change?

This is an up to date story, full of gossip, chatter and adaptation. Solar panels are newly being permitted to charge up battery powered tools. However the rules say that they may not be used for electrical lighting, or anything else with wires. Good food is very much a part of life, with the cafe being the centre of the Seasons Of The Heart series - this is the fourth book.

Two months after her new life begins, while farmers wait to have horses shod at the smithy, Annie Mae accepts a ride in a sports car owned by a young man called Lonnie. While from a Plain family, Lonnie has an outside job and looking at the BMW's comfortable upholstery and satnav, Annie Mae starts to realise that Lonnie will never take the adult commitment to the church. However, she has a hard lesson or two to learn about Lonnie... and about her father. Good thing she has a friend like Adam Wagler, who turns up when he's needed.

This fun tale is written in a different style to other Amish books I've read; more forthright and full of natural conversation. I was amused to see that Annie Mae's father's vision of a new order includes a new, much younger wife. Adam kept the motorbike he rode during his teenage days, and he and Annie Mae take a ride on it, something that doesn't happen in most of these stories. Try Charlotte Hubbard's BREATH OF SPRING for a breath of fresh air - and then try the scrumptious recipes at the back of the book.