Treva Zimmerman is a young Mennonite woman who has just spent six months working on an aid mission in Haiti. She thought she had found a steady boyfriend, but he didn’t want to leave Haiti, and she didn’t want to stay. BY EVENING’S LIGHT shows how Treva returns to Lancaster County to visit her kind Amish grandparents and starts to make choices about the rest of her life.

For the Amish, the folks are actually very modern, allowing phones to be used and encouraging Treva to hire a car and driver at times. Arden and Priscilla open their home to visiting refugees from Syria, run a shop as well as the farm, and are reconciled to their children travelling to the four corners of the globe. Treva has a job offer for a few weeks in Alaska, and she might extend it and come back during the winter. That sounds good. But would it make her happy? She is in two minds. And her family members are getting older.

Treva’s unmarried great-great-aunt Rosene Simons tells her about her early life at the end of WW2. She had lived in Germany, and her family fled the Russian seizure of East Berlin. Much as good people feared the Nazis, she says, they feared the Russians more. Cold War Germany is reflected in the story as Rosene describes travels and hardships for refugees and the Red Cross workers who aided them, like her sister Martha. Rosene knows she is getting frail and wants to pass on her story. The chapters are interspersed in first person, so the effect is dual timelines.

The research and family memories embedded in the account are substantial. The downside for me is that, not knowing anyone from this Amish Memories series, I found too many names and places to follow easily. Gabe Johnson is a farm worker who left the Zimmermans’ farm to join the Army, which Mennonites could do, and now he shows up again, ‘coincidentally’ to help Treva. Rosene had a beau called Zeke Zimmerman – her sister married into Treva’s family – but he fought in WW2 and went away from the land afterwards. There are many parallels, and at times, I did find it confusing when I came back to read the next day.

The modern half has e-mail, text, DNA testing and more. The family still uses horse-drawn machinery, though, and refuses electricity in the house. Leslie Gould presents a thoughtful depiction of changing life and generational patterns in BY EVENING’S LIGHT, the final book of the trilogy. The more things change, the more they remain the same.