Jolina Petersheim Books in Order

If you want her signature Mennonite drama: The Outcast → The Midwife
If you want post-apocalyptic suspense: The Alliance → The Divide
If you want a quieter story of grief and hope: How the Light Gets In

Jolina Petersheim was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and moved to Tennessee when she was three. Her family story runs through Mennonite, Amish, and Brethren roots, and she has said that this Plain heritage stayed with her even when she was not sure what to do with it. That background later became one of the steady currents in her fiction.

She grew up in Tennessee as the daughter of caretakers at a Christian camp, in a childhood that sounds half bookish and half outdoorsy. She has written about catching turtles and frogs, picking berries, and letting the woods feed her imagination. At home, words mattered too. Her father worked as a carpenter, but he also wrote songs, sometimes jotting lines on scrap boards with a carpenter’s pencil.

Books got to her early. She has pointed to L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series as the moment a child’s love of songs and stories turned into a real wish to write novels. Later she studied Communication Arts and English, with a creative writing emphasis, at the University of the Cumberlands. She worked on the student paper and a literary journal there, and she has said she was the first person in her immediate family to pursue higher education.

For a while, though, that writing dream looked easy to lose.

When she was deep into drafting The Outcast, about 25,000 words in, she met the agent who would eventually represent her. She was also pregnant and had started to think writing might need to wait. Instead, the book moved forward, and her debut showed the kind of stories she wanted to tell, stories about shame, secrecy, faith, and the hidden costs of community life.

The Outcast remains a good example of what readers find in her work. It places Rachel Stoltzfus inside an Old Order Mennonite community and reworks The Scarlet Letter through gossip, judgment, and a painful refusal to name the father of her child. The Midwife followed with another emotionally knotted story, this time about surrogacy, motherhood, and forgiveness, as Beth Winslow and Rhoda Mummau’s lives collide at a Tennessee home for unwed mothers. Petersheim has said writing that second novel became a tether during early motherhood, something she worked on while caring for a newborn.

Then she took a sharp turn into speculative fiction.

With The Alliance and The Divide, she kept her interest in Plain-community life but dropped it into a post-disaster landscape. Those novels follow Leora Ebersole, Moses Hughes, and Jabil Snyder as an Old Order Mennonite community in Montana tries to survive after the power grid collapses. The books still care about romance and belief, but they also ask harder survival questions, especially what pacifism means when danger is no longer abstract.

Her fifth novel, How the Light Gets In, shifts back to a quieter, more intimate scale. Set around a Wisconsin cranberry farm, it follows a grieving widow and reads as a modern echo of Ruth. Across all five novels, Petersheim returns to women at crossroads, family bonds under pressure, and communities that can shelter people one moment and wound them the next. Readers who like her work often respond to that mix of Plain setting, moral pressure, and very human mess.

She has also published nonfiction, but fiction seems to be where she keeps asking her biggest questions. These days she lives in the mountains of Tennessee with her husband and four daughters. The old interests are still there, faith, belonging, memory, hard choices, and what it costs to love people well.