Plain and Simple Books in Order

Plain and Simple is a two-book series set between modern city life and Oregon Amish country. It starts with Plain Jayne and continues with Simply Sara. Rather than telling a familiar insider-only Amish story, Hillary Manton Lodge takes a different route. One book follows a journalist looking in. The next follows a young woman stepping out.

That switch in perspective gives the series its shape. In Plain Jayne, reporter Jayne Tate is knocked off balance by her father's death and trouble at work, and she heads to the Oregon countryside hoping a story about an Amish family might steady her. Instead, she gets pulled into the daily life of the Burkholders, especially Levi Burkholder, a man whose relationship to the Amish world is already complicated. Jayne arrives with city instincts, deadlines, and a reporter's curiosity, and that outsider energy keeps the first book moving.

Oregon matters here.

The setting gives the series a feel that stands apart from more familiar Amish fiction. Lodge plays the contrast between Portland speed and rural quiet very well. Buggies, farm routines, family meals, and church expectations are all part of the landscape, but the books are really asking bigger questions than simple culture clash. What makes a life good? What do people owe their families? When does leaving become growth, and when does it become loss? The tension comes less from twisty plotting and more from people trying to answer those questions honestly.

Simply Sara carries those questions into a new phase. Sara Burkholder has left Amish life behind and moved in with Jayne, which means the second book no longer asks only how an outsider sees the Plain world. It asks what happens when someone raised inside that world tries English life for herself. A bookstore job, new clothes, makeup, driving, school, and a growing connection with Will Blythe all open up possibilities for Sara. They also make the cost of change much harder to ignore.

Nobody gets a simple answer.

That is the strength of the duet. Jayne and Sara are both searching for a place to belong, but they are moving in opposite directions. Jayne is learning to slow down and reconsider the life she built so carefully. Sara is learning that freedom can be exciting and lonely at the same time. Levi and the Burkholder family tie those journeys together, not as symbols of an ideal life, but as people with loyalties, hurts, and limits of their own.

Overall, Plain and Simple is a gentle contemporary series with romance, humor, and a steady thread of spiritual searching. Readers should expect fish-out-of-water moments, personal reinvention, and characters who keep discovering that the life they imagined may not be the one that fits. The books are warm without pretending change is easy, and that gives the series its staying power.