Rhoda Janzen begins “Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home” with a trifecta of midlevel tragedies: a hysterectomy, an automobile accident and a failed marriage. None is quite epic ...

When I first heard about “Mennonite in a Little Black Dress,” (Holt, 256 pages, $22) I was aghast. Not because author Rhoda Janzen poked fun at the subculture I was born and raised in — goodness knows ...

That an adult convert to a religious community of plain people would look more generously on the group than someone who grew up in one and then left it is not surprising. Robert Rhodes, author of ...

The Allegan Area Arts Council and Friends Committee of Allegan District Library are teaming up to present an evening with author Dr. Rhoda Janzen. Janzen, a Hope College professor of English and ...

At first, the worst week of Janzen's life—she gets into a debilitating car wreck right after her husband leaves her for a guy he met on the Internet and saddles her with a mortgage she can't ...

Everybody knows the morning-after embarrassment of the mysteriously random sex dream. My most unlikely dream partners have been Dan Quayle and an Amish farmer. While I'm at a loss to explain the first ...

The Mennonite vs. Amish distinction is difficult to pinpoint for most outsiders since they both represent some of the most conservative groups in the modern world. Although closely related in ...

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking tells a harrowing story of women in an isolated Mennonite colony attempting to find justice in the wake of vicious abuse by the men of their community. Adapted from Miriam ...

I worry that it might be impossible to share with anyone who doesn’t have a background similar to Rhoda Janzen’s the wicked pleasure that comes from a glance at her title: Mennonite in a Little Black ...