Plain Again is the third installment of the Plain Fame Series by Sarah Price. It is the immediate sequel to Plain Change which left the newlywed protagonists, Amanda Beiler Diaz and Alejandro (Viper) Diaz, facing forces that threaten their union just weeks into their marriage. Alejandro, a hip hop superstar, had plans for taking Amanda along on his tour. These plans have come to naught when Amanda returns to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to aid her Amish family in a crisis. Her father had suffered a stroke that leaves him unable to take care of the family's farm.
Amanda misses Alejandro dearly, but finds that she has missed the Amish life while she had been away for those short weeks. However, at the same time, she realizes that she has changed too. Even though she welcomes the familiarity of the simpler Amish way of living, she now views some parts of her Amish upbringing to be rigid and unaccepting. It also stings her to find that her people regard and treat her as though she is an outsider to the community because she has chosen to marry Alejandro and not be baptized into the Amish church. Besides coping with the rejection from people who had previously accepted her, Amanda must deal with the paparazzi who have returned to disrupt the quiet life in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Her Amish neighbours resent the intrusion from the outsiders and blame Amanda for it.
Alejandro is finding it difficult to be on the road apart from Amanda. He wants to show the world that he is happily married, but it doesn't take long for the paparazzi to discover that he and Amanda are not together and the rumours begin to swirl about a troubled marriage. It doesn't help that his manager, Mike, and a segment of Viper's fans prefer the previous bad boy persona that Alejandro portrayed to the public before his marriage to Amanda. Will Amanda's and Alejandro's marriage survive the separation and the threats that rise up against their marriage?
I found the spiritual journeys for Amanda and Alejandro to be rather interesting. In this novel, Amanda recognizes things that are culturally Amish but that may not necessarily be connected to a life saving faith. Amanda also sees God acting in her relationship with Alejandro, but Amanda's sister, Anna, still asks her a significant question: where God is in Amanda's life? This was a rather puzzling question, because it does seem as if God is moving in the background. However, while reading the books in the series, I have wondered how much Amanda has actually prayed to God for guidance over what to do. It seems to me that she didn't really ask Him for direction over what she should have done when faced with the intrusion of the paparazzi in the first book, Plain Fame. It didn't appear as if she asked God for guidance as to whether or not she should have left Lititz with Alejandro, or whether or not she should have married him. I don't think that she prayed about separating from Alejandro so soon into their marriage even though she is doing a good thing in helping her parents and sister. Perhaps it was meant for the reader to understand that Amanda did in fact pray about these decisions, but so far, it seems as if she decided these things on her own or got swept along by the circumstances into her present situation. Perhaps, by the grace and mercy of God, things will work out well for Amanda and Alejandro, even though they didn't consult much with Him over what to do.
As for Alejandro, I still think of him in the same way as I had while I was reading the previous two novels in the Plain Fame series: it feels as if he knows of Jesus, but I'm not convinced that he *knows* Jesus. He seems to be a nominal Christian, and there are still major areas of his life that could use Jesus' touch in it, especially in the content of his risqué songs and videos. If Alejandro is, in fact, a saved individual, then what he really needs to do is to get all of his life under the influence of Jesus. Maybe he needs more time to grow as a follower of the Lord. I hope that as the series unfolds, the details of whether he truly knows Jesus will become more clear.
I like Alejandro. As I mentioned in a previous review of the Plain Fame series, he is quite a romantic man. Alejandro wants to be better man because of Amanda. He isn't happy about the separation between Amanda and himself, but he tries to show that he supports her decisions. He hires a farm worker to assist on Amanda's parents' farm and a nurse to help care for her father. When the two of them are able to reunite, he pulls out all the stops to show Amanda how much he loves her. They are married now, and I didn't comment about their marriage in the review that I wrote for Plain Change because I thought that it would have been too much of a spoiler. Their intimate moments are not explicit, but the times leading up them...well,...sometimes I felt like looking away, because I felt as if I were intruding in private encounters only meant to be shared between the two of them.
I would not consider Plain Again to be a stand alone book, although it probably could do so just a *little* more successfully than Plain Change would. The conclusion of Plain Again has a satisfactory ending, if one decides to stop reading the series at this point; for a number of years, only the Plain Fame, Plain Change, and Plain Again had been published. However, Plain Return, and Plain Choice, the fourth and fifth novels of the series, have been released during the past few months. There are still some loose plot threads that haven't been resolved yet, and I still feel invested enough in Amanda's and Alejandro's story to want to find out what happens to them.
Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of "Plain Again" by Sarah Price from NetGalley in exchange for a review. All opinions stated in the review are mine.
