Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. Culture vulture April Wallace is here. Welcome back.
Wallace: Thank you. Good to see you.
Kellams: Good to see you. You bring us recommendations of what you suggest we spend our time with, but you always have a question as well. What's this time's question this time?
Wallace: I'd love to know how many copies and/or formats of your favorite books do you own?
Kellams: One. One. I'm a physical book guy, and if I have a physical book, I don't know what I need. So you're saying, like, do I have the book, the audio book, the Kindle version? Well, okay, so what? Maybe I don't understand what you're asking.
Wallace: Okay. So for instance, my favorite book is "Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffenegger. So I have the mass-produced paperback, right? And then I have a nice, pretty hardcover.
Kellams: I see.
Wallace: And then I have the special edition, like a different cover. Red line pages. There's a cat. If you line it up with the other books.
Kellams: I see.
Wallace: And then I also have the audio, because why not? Like, I'd love to, you know, listen to it.
Kellams: Sure.
Wallace: Little snippet to brighten my day.
Kellams: I'm one. I think my favorite books, I've got one. And some of my favorite books I currently have zero because I loan them out.
Wallace: And that's the reason to have a multiple copy. Yeah.
Kellams: What are you going to recommend for us this week?
Wallace: We're still keeping it light because it is still hot out there.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: And I just can't be serious right now. I'm not a huge reality TV person, but I do have one that I would recommend currently called "Suddenly Amish." It is exactly what it sounds like. They take someone like you and me and say, boom, you're living the Amish lifestyle now.
Kellams: Mhm.
Wallace: They drop you off at the farm. You probably have your suitcase on wheels. There is nothing paved out there, and you just got to book it to the farmhouse. And you go to live with a community of Amish people who are looking for greater diversity in their community. Their communities have gotten smaller and therefore, as their youngest become marriage age, there are no real eligible suitors because they are mostly related.
Kellams: So what's the end game here? The participants spend a month and maybe stick around. The participants spend a month and maybe fall in love with a younger, a similar aged Amish person.
Wallace: All of the above. So there, the end of the series coincides with what they call Reckoning Day, which is where they need to make a decision whether they want to move forward or not. Not everybody makes it to Reckoning Day. That is part of the drama.
There is some drama. It's not quite as high strung as a lot of reality shows, which would probably turn me off. But there is some human drama because they're all living in these, there are two farmhouses they can choose from. They have a host of Amish couples that help them know when to get up and all that for the day. Quite early.
But it's all pointed toward Reckoning Day. Whether they want to make a decision to actually integrate into the community and not just try it on for size.
Kellams: So where can we see this?
Wallace: This is on Hulu. And just as a kind of snapshot of, like, the difference of perspective they bring of the men, one seems more tolerant to the Amish church, but he has been brought up, he's a pastor's kid, but he has the struggle of his hearing aids being connected to his phone, which is immediately taken away. So he has to figure out a different accommodation for his hearing.
Kellams: Mhm.
Wallace: Another man is Black and is not around any other people of color. And he grew up in the city and he has a phobia for farm animals, so that complicates things.
Kellams: I would imagine.
Wallace: The third man has been divorced. And that becomes a contention point because of the whole concept of trying to get more people who are marriage eligible. So that's his main thing. But he likes the lifestyle and he wants to bring his kids into it.
Kellams: Not that reality television is ever, you know, into exploitation, but this sounds like it could get into exploitation. It sounds like the way you're describing it, it doesn't.
Wallace: I think it's very respectful of the Amish community that they are with, partly because they seem to have chosen people in their Amish community that are more liberal and tolerant of people from outside of their community. So they're not there to make fun of Amish people, right?
And they are very careful to wait a certain amount of time before even allowing the English people to try on Amish clothing, for instance. And when they go to things like the Amish church together, they are not allowed inside the facility, the cameras, and they take shots from far away. It feels mostly pretty ethically done.
They blur out faces of anyone who has not agreed to be a part of this. So in shots, B-roll shots where you see the horse and buggy go by, often it's with blurred faces and stuff like that, because they don't want to show off someone's private life.
But there are, I'd say, four or five Amish people who have agreed to be kind of like a docent, like showing you around. And they don't seem to bat an eye when, you know, someone cusses because they, you know, like, drop the shovel, you know, what have you. They don't seem too bothered by how they are.
Wallace: It is not fall, as you know.
Kellams: It’s almost fall.
Wallace: I mean, it doesn't feel like fall.
Kellams: I was pointing out to my wife the other day that you looked on our yard, and there were a lot of dead leaves on the yard, but not because of the autumn, just because of the drought, anyway. No. So it is not fall.
Wallace: It is not. But it can feel like fall if I turn on like a, I know you like cozy mysteries. I like something with a supernatural bent.
Kellams: Okay, sure, sure, sure, sure.
Wallace: So I'm currently listening to the audio of "The Bewitching" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. She came into popular readership with her "Mexican Gothic" some years ago. It was very interestingly done, like a lot more unique and complex of mysteries. So I was happy to see this.
Minerva is the main character for this tale, but it's a tale that has a modern timeline and a more ancient timeline, and we bounce between the two. In the modern one, Minerva is a graduate student at an Ivy League college on the East Coast. She is Mexican American. She has all the struggles of a very bright academic who comes from an immigrant family who is working while studying. And so we often see her working several times more hard than her peers.
She has an RA position on campus, so she's in charge of the dorm. And therefore, you know, all the things of keeping kids in line who have a little bit of freedom finally. But it comes with that odd dynamic of they might view her differently because she does not come from money, and they do. So there's a lot of privilege involved. I think it's interesting even on that level.
But we discover that there are strange things going on on campus that she has to uncover, and it kind of triggers her deep family sense of there generally just being supernatural things in life, that there are other forces, that there are witches and that they have very real effects on people walking around.
So she is like a literature student in search of a thesis and struggling with it. Relatable. And she happens upon a story that took place on her campus from the early 1900s that involved a female author who did not rise to fame, who grew up in the same sort of time frame as another male author who did happen to become famous.
And everybody's wanting her to just do the easy thing, follow the male author's, you know, career and write something new about him. Everybody would love to read that. She doesn't want to do that. She wants to give more light to the female authorship that went unnoticed for more than a century, and in the process learns that there was a student who disappeared at the time that Beatrice, the author, was a student on the very campus. She has to pull a lot of strings and, you know, be in some inconvenient places. But it leads to her finding an unpublished manuscript that gives a theory for why the girl disappeared and what could have made that happen.
Kellams: April Wallace is an instructor at the University of Arkansas. She's our culture vulture. April, thank you so much.
Wallace: Thank you.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
