Welcome to Litsy!

Found this at our library book sale over a year ago and didn‘t expect much. I was swept in by the emotional complexity and fortitude of the narrator, Becky Cooper, who is brought into the Shaker community through her husband. Holt Giles gives a nuanced (but mostly critical) look at the strange and fascinating movement. Becky‘s growth as a character is really satisfying and the scope of the novel seems to leave no aspect of Shaker life unexamined.

I did not expect this book to pull me in as much as it has, but here I am now, watching the sun rise in Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill. It‘s been a special experience to read a book about Shaker life while staying in what used to be a thriving Shaker community.

There were never better craftsmen in the world than Shakers. Though they gave no thought to beauty, each thing they made so carefully, so practically, had its own beauty in its simplicity and attention to detail.

I do not know how long he preached. All sense of time was lost, for within fifteen minutes of his first words we saw [...] people throw up their hands, spin and whirl round and round, fall to the ground and lie still as death. We saw them carried off as stiff as corpses, and laid where they would not be trampled.