Okay....
So I just finished this book. Didn't read every line in it, but skimmed it.
There are two things going on in this book. One is a really wacky storyline about a Chassidish guy who finds out that he's a mamzar so he goes undercover as an Amish guy to try to convince an Amish girl to convert by becoming his shifcha kenanis and thus be allowed to marry him and have kosher children.
The second aspect of this book is the conversations he has with her, in which he argues against and disproves many of the Christian beliefs. Those conversations are very much dispersed into the storyline, in a very similar format to the way Abie Rotenberg infuses the storyline of "The Season of Pepsi Meyers" with hashkafic ideas and speeches.
Now here's my analysis. I enjoyed the overall book, with all it's signature Sender Zeyv quirkiness. The storyline is completely unrealistic, but so is his other books. There is something about his almost geeky, always-works-out type of storytelling that is interesting and relatable.
However, I thoroughly did not like the discussions of Christianity in the book. It's one thing to discuss hashkafah, like Abie Rotenberg does. It's a whole 'nother thing to discuss Peter and Luke and Yoshke and all those other subjects - even if your goal is to discredit them. It's highly questionable le'halacha to study those things, and perhaps someone who has to deal with certain people should know those topics, I don't think putting them into a novel is the correct place for that. The only redeeming factor for this critique is that it was very easy to simply gloss over those paragraphs, and to just skip to where the storyline picks up again.
Overall, it was really enjoyable to read a Sender Zeyv book that I was previously unfamiliar with.
