Reviewed by L. Lois
What Mennonite Girls Are Good For
(Iowa Short Fiction Award)
by Jennifer Sears
University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 978-1-68597-049-9, Nov 2025, 147 pages, $US19
Jennifer Sears approaches what it is to be a Mennonite born female with the candor and humor of an insider who’s still searching for the exit hatch. What Mennonite Girls Are Good For won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and is Sears’ debut collection.
Ruthie is adorable and backward, mystical, and always a bit confused. Her grandfather might understand her, but he would never explain. Life is a jumble of circumstances made worse by missionary travels and swirling cultures, simultaneously cooperative and at odds. Every situation invites Ruthie to a crisis of faith she may or may not enjoy. Repression breeds the very thing it attempts to hide. A magical realism seems like divination — but isn’t holiness. Even so, it lurks around the next corner, with its unique absurdity.
Poor Ruthie. She was still too young to recognize that others didn’t feel the same sensations or the storm’s approach…(141)
Sears takes the reader’s hand and jumps straight into the deep end — with Ruthie and her parents, Ruthie and her twin sister, Ruthie and her girlfriends, Ruthie and her lovers. The tales meander. They intersect, like a cleverly placed reminder here and there. They break out in preaching, then explore surreal plots under the covers with a flashlight.
Ruthie is a witch and an imp. Maybe she’s an oracle. A truth-teller, or a condemned questioner. She delights the reader, regardless of religious upbringing, as she is the girl we recognize.
In the titular story, Ruthie plays a high stakes game of chicken. She’s at the wheel of her father’s truck and she’s obeying the speed limit. But there’s another man involved, and he’s both confused and confusing. Her father’s presence looms, too — of course. And there’s a third man who represents the owner of the cattle on a thousand hills, the One Who Can Exhibit Anger. Ruthie is irritated. She’s hot under the collar, itching for a fight. She’s confronted by desire that lacks the context to act. She is disgusted, even as she plays at being empowered. She tests out what it feels like to be nasty. She knows Mennonite girls are good for nothing, but also good for cooking, for baby making, for being helpful and nice.
“You don’t know shit about your own life,” Jesús said. “How can you pity me?” (98)
The Mennonites, the Hutterites, the Amish, the Anorexic — we’re fascinated by the foreign stories among us. We recognize the liturgy even if the language is different. We admire the fresh bread for Sunday faspa, and we flip through the More With Less cookbook on the thrift store bookshelf. We’re curious. We’re compassionate. We’re slightly worried. We’re bothered. And, surprise, so are they.
No matter where you go, you’ll keep running from that world that doesn’t fit you. That doesn’t fit us. But neither does the world outside that world. (81)
Enjoy this emerging fiction writer who will entertain you, will show you something you didn’t know you would recognize, and will occasionally deliver a devilish hymn or a four-letter sermon. She’ll repent quickly, apologize for the diversion, and retreat to her interior war. Read for an answer to the rhetorical question hidden behind a dangling preposition: What Mennonite Girls Are Good For. It’s a high-stakes adventure, with planes, guns, pervs, and the gyrations of a goddess in disguise. At the end of the day, it’s a short story collection about religious syncretization, told with a voice of winsome aloofness that makes funnier-than-hell into its own corner plot in heaven.
She bent and then buckled, generations of prayer requests sliding down her until she too was lost, nothing but mulch. (135)
About the reviewer: L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting into her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, while prioritizing writing, publication, and arts-related volunteerism. Her poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Brussels Review, Washington Square Review, Hanging Loose Magazine, Chiron Review, Poetry Breakfast, among other publications. L. Lois is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets, is part of the editorial team at Quibble Lit, and freelances as a business feature writer and poetry workshop leader. A selection of her published work is linked at https://poeting.my.canva.site.