The Alliance by Jolina Petersheim

When Leora Ebersole sees the small plane crash in her Old Order Mennonite community, she has no idea it’s a foreshadowing of things to come. Once the young pilot, Moses Hughes, regains consciousness, they realize his instruments were destroyed by the same power outage that killed the electricity at the community store, where Englischers are stranded with dead cell phones and cars that won’t start.

Moses offers a sobering theory, but no one can know how drastically life is about to change. With the only self-sustaining food supply in the region, the Pacifist community is forced to forge an alliance with the handful of stranded Englischers in an effort to protect not only the food but their very lives.

In the weeks that follow, Leora, Moses, and the community will be tested as never before, requiring them to make decisions they never thought possible. Whom will they help and whom will they turn away? When the community receives news of a new threat, everyone must decide how far they’re willing to go to protect their beliefs and way of life.

About The Author

Jolina Petersheim is the bestselling author of The Outcast, which Library Journal called “outstanding . . . fresh and inspirational” in a starred review and named one of the best books of 2013. That book also became an ECPA, CBA, and Amazon bestseller and was featured in Huffington Post’s Fall Picks, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and the Tennessean. CBA Retailers + Resources called her second book, The Midwife, “an excellent read [that] will be hard to put down,” and Romantic Times declared, “Petersheim is an amazing new author.” Jolina and her husband share the same unique Amish and Mennonite heritage that originated in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. After years of living in the mountains of Tennessee, they moved to a farm in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, where they live with their two young daughters.


My Review 

Wow! What a different type of Plain story, an old order Mennonite community is our setting in Ohio. Can you imagine seeing a small plane falling out of the sky and crashing, and the pilot is really not seriously injured.
At the same time the plane crashes everything else stops working, and he seems to have landed, or crashed where he is needed, in an Old Order Mennonite Community, in Ohio. Now why would he need to be here?
As you turn the pages of the book, all law and order has ceased, and people start coming for handouts, as you would expect, but gangs are on the horizon, and out for no good.
The compassion and love these people showed others, but they are Pacifists and who will be able to help them. Moses Hughes is the pilot, and Leora Ebersole is the other main character, and these two opposites seem to click. The community takes in others, and a few other non-mennonite along with Moses take on an alliance to help.
When things go from bad to worse, I loved Moses reference of why he was staying where he was, back to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and who told he wasn’t that Moses, made me chuckle.
We rather end this story on a cliffhanger, and I don’t know who made it, and how they are going to survive, or what happens. Sure can’t wait for book two in this, I need to know!
I received this book through Tyndale House Publishers, and was not required to give a positive review.