Miriam Toews

Meet the Troutmans. Hattie is living in Paris, but has been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sister back in Canada, is going through a dark period. So when Hattie receives a call from Min's eleven year-old son begging her to return to Canada, she knows she has to go.

"A 16-year-old rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family ..."--Publishers Weekly.

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the "minutes" of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.-- For the past two years women and girls in a Mennonite colony has been repeatedly violated in the night by "demons" coming to punish them for their sins. Now the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community. Determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm, the women meet while the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home. These women--- all illiterate, unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-- must choose: Stay in the only world they've ever known, or dare to escape? -- adapted from publisher info

The stifling, reclusive life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew moves in to make a movie about the strict religious community in which she and her family live.

Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. But Elf's latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Can she be nursed back to "health" in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.

Reflective writings on topics that are taboo to speak of in female culture.