To Everything a Season

One June night, on a dark country road, two worlds-one of privilege and wealth, one modest and plain-collide, and tragedy forces two families together, causing both to question the lives they lead.

Taylor Loden, heiress-apparent to her father's media empire, is fused 24/7 to her two cell phones, wakes up in the middle of the night to check emails, and has never examined her breakneck work pace or her empty life until she meets the Old Order Amish Yoder family of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Taylor has zero desire to muck a barn or strip tobacco, yet feels compelled, for reasons she's not prone to analyze, to temporarily trade her technology-fueled business life in Philadelphia for country life without electricity on the Yoder farm. While she strives to adapt to Amish life, she bonds with the family, especially with two of the Yoder siblings: Jacob and Becca.

Jacob, the eldest son, refuses to baptize and join the church, and according to his frustrated father, lacks direction. He not only faces a grave physical challenge resulting from his actions that June night, but also harbors a secret that threatens to upend his family and community.

Becca is 16, entering her rumspringa, the time period when she is free to explore the normally forbidden modern world. When Taylor returns to her Philadelphia penthouse, Becca accompanies her for the summer and for the first time is exposed to city life-museums, music, technology, restaurants, fashion, even religious faiths different from her own.

Taylor mentors Becca's city fling and helps Jacob conceal his secret, actions that jeopardize her relationship with the Yoder family and her father. As the two cultures clash, both families struggle to determine whether the deep ties that bind them are greater than the differences that threaten to tear them apart. Ultimately, Taylor, Jacob and Becca must answer for themselves: Are we more than what we do for a living or where we're born? And if so, what price, if any, is too steep to walk away from family expectations?

To Everything A Season is a perfect book club selection-smart and sophisticated contemporary women's fiction that invites discussion as well as touches the heart.