Amity: Stories from the Heartland

 Amity: Stories from the Heartland

Reviewed By  Ian Banks       November 29, 2023

 

Author  J Brent Bill

Distributor:      Roundfire Books
ISBN:                 978-1-80341-366-2
Publisher:         Collectiveink Books/ John Hunt Publishing
Release Date:   November 2023  

   Website:   https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/roundfire-books/our-books/amity-stories-from-heartland

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With a gentle sense of humour J. Brent Bill takes us back to a time when life was so much less complicated than it is today while visiting the little moments that make people special in Amity: stories from the Heartland.

A delightful beginning The trip to Amity, is a situation so many will recognise as familiar, or perhaps not so familiar. Waiting for the husband or wife to hurry up, to stop always running late. Anger getting the better of judgement, tension high once the vehicle gets into motion. Words spoken the atmosphere thick. Arriving at their destination late, he gathers his robes, stoles and notes heading into the Church; small congregation he thinks. That is until he discovers he is in the wrong church!

Places to go is a very quirky tale of the desire to drive, to have the freedom to go whenever she wanted to, to shop wherever she felt like it without having someone take her. Mrs Henry so desperately wanted to drive and was determined not to let anything stop her, until that fateful day when she decided she could do it, which did not work out at all as she expected.

A Christmas Carol singing outing takes a rather interesting turn when a young singer asks why the ladies are all having babies if they are not married which somehow, as these questions are wont to do, leads the singers down a rather uncomfortable pathway into a carol service that would probably never viewed in the same light again.

The tables are turned with the last two stories which see Mrs Henry return after the death of her husband. She is now a woman who now has to make her own decisions, the family grown and settled, she with the freedom to fly a little, to be able to go where she wants to go and in the manner, you guessed it, she chooses to travel.

In the final story in this quirky and entertaining collection, the other side of the trip to Amity is laid bare in Another Trip to Amity in which so many varied thoughts go through the mind of the Pastor’s wife on their mad dash to get to the service on time.

Brent Bill is a Quaker Minister who has always enjoyed telling tales. Amity; stories from the Heartland is his first publication of some of the many stories he has told over the years. His light touch, lovely sense of people and their wonderfully quirky style of managing to travel life’s often expected pathway, creates a lovely heart-warming collection.

Fiction