Yellow Wood - eBook

Author Terry Trafton's second novel Yellow Wood
 
  Late summers in Southern Indiana blaze with vibrant colors, and nowhere are they bolder and more spectacular than across the rolling hillsides and among the long grain fields around Jasper and Huntingburg in an area known as Yellow Wood. Against this fiery backdrop begins an enchanting and unusual love story that puts conscience and faith in conflict. Physician and amateur photographer 35-year-old Aaron Fain is obsessed with a beautiful and mysterious Amish woman who has the uncanny ability to see things before they happen. When Aaron looks at the secretive photographs he took of Emily Yoder, he is shocked. In her eyes are images that are not only fascinating but also inexplicably frightening. In the seductive heat of a sweltering Midwestern summer, overwhelming passions push their relationship beyond the boundaries of friendship. Fear of having to choose between her love for Aaron and her devotion to the customs and dictates of the Ordnung weighs heavily on Emily’s conscience. Captivated by the simplicity and deep spirituality of the Amish, and despite his continued efforts toward a deeper understanding, Fain‘s ideas of Amish culture remain idealized and superficial. One evening at sunset while sitting uneasily in the Yoder’s sparsely furnished living room, Fain sees propped against the back of a stiff wooden chair a cloth doll without a face, without hands and feet. He immediately realizes Emily wants him to see how fundamental her life and culture are in contrast with his romanticized perceptions. It is this revelation that causes a disenchanted Aaron Fain to turn to Susan Adams who has returned to Jasper, Indiana after a recent divorce. To her Aaron reveals a conscience darkened heavily by guilt and anguish.
Late on a moonlit night, a slender shape on the stone pathway in Fain’s garden, Emily reaches for Aaron and asks him to proclaim his love for her one last time before the night sky changes forever. Above them in the stone-cold blackness of space, a new star blinks icy white. No longer is the vain Cassiopeia the reigning queen in the starry sky. The blue light of a new star without a constellation calls to Fain who realizes too late the depth and sincerity of Emily's love. It is then that Aaron Fain understands the mystery that is Emily Yoder.
Yellow Wood is a sensitive and magical love story about a materialistic starry-eyed doctor and an enigmatic Amish woman who has a profound knowledge of the stars and a mysterious alliance with the Lyra constellation. Set in the Amish Triangle of Southern Indiana, the story with its paranormal overtones reveals the tenuous and fragile nature of relationships. Yellow Wood is a romantic narrative guaranteed to keep the reader’s attention from beginning to end.
 
A Fox Lane Book
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Publication Date:  (July, 2019)
Hardcover: 234 pages
ISBN: 978-1-64237-756-33