Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen



My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an incredible book -- one of those rare finds for me that is a memoir, but much more. Janzen shares her childhood memories of growing up in the Mennonite culture, with all of the wonderfully funny and strange tales of Sunday school, family trips, school lunches, and coping with parents who took thriftiness to the extreme. She also takes a very painful and honest look at her own journey in life--marrying a man struggling with depression and diagnosed as being bipolar. He was not only not Mennonite, he was not religious in any way and ultimately left her for a man he met online named Bob.

In a very wierd way, I could really relate with her life, having grown up in a fundamentalist home with a long list of "Thou shalt nots." I married a minister and had two children; I also became a licensed minister, and then my life fell apart. While my ex-husband did not leave me for a man named Bob, I was just as shattered as Rhoda sounds in this book. Like her, I was blessed with friends and family who helped me heal, and helped me raise my two beautiful children.

Janzen writes about teaching and writing, food and sex, grief and longing, childhood passions and terrors, truth and God and doubt and redemption. I may not make any of the recipes included at the end of the book, but I felt satisfied all the same.

You can find Mennonite in a Little Black Dress on the New Fiction shelf.

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c Waterloo Public Library 2010