Char, Charred

In the 1970s recent college grad Char flees to the idyllic Pennsylvania-Dutch countryside to consider her future. Staying with a Mennonite great-aunt, she meets Amish bad boy Uri Stoltzfus, who agrees to serve as her guide to the Plain culture. Both Char and Uri have hard choices to make about the values they will embrace in this coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of a turbulent decade. Feminism, racism, the Vietnam War, more permissive attitudes toward sex and drugs, and new types of music collide with a way of life unchanged for centuries. Char also meets another great-aunt whose very existence proves an affair between Char's great-grandmother and an unidentified lover. Who was he and why did he not assume responsibility for his daughter? Char hopes that finding an answer to this family mystery will help her solve her own dark secret.