In 1955, seventeen-year-old Loretta Willems flew to Japan to marry a nineteen-year-old boy she had only known three weeks before he left for a two-year tour of duty with the Air Force. She had just graduated from high school, and she felt her decision was both mature and practical. To her, marriage, children and a home of her own were what life was all about, and she did not want to lose out on the opportunity the boy’s proposal presented. She was on the threshold of adult life and eager to get started.

The marriage story is not the only one this book tells. Behind and around it is another story, one that provides the context for that young marriage, a story of wrestling with a religious heritage that carried both blessing and curse.

My father, Jacob Willems, was the fifth of the fifteen children born to Jacob C. and Lena Zimmerman Willems, who, in 1919 moved their large family from a Mennonite community in Saskatchewan, Canada to another Mennonite community—this one in the rich farmland surrounding the small towns of Reedley and Dinuba in California’s great Central Valley. Most of the Mennonites who settled in this fertile farmland prospered. Jacob and Lena did not. They struggled to survive, yet the stories their children told were filled with laughter.

Agnes Young was fourteen in 1936 when she married twenty-one year old Jacob Willems and joined him on his vagabond life, traveling California’s country roads, sleeping in tents and cabins, picking up work wherever they could find it—harvesting grapes, peaches and apricots in spring and summer; pruning grapevines and fruit trees in winter—ready to pick up and move on whenever work dried up or her husband got an itch to try someplace new. Two years later she gave birth to her first child––a daughter she named Loretta, the author of this book. Agnes was only sixteen when she became a mother; yet she managed to create a stable home for her family, a home that felt secure and safe.

Child Bride begins with of Agnes and Jacob’s romance and scandalous marriage, and  then turns to the author’s early memories of her parents and and growing up in World War II California. Richly illustrated with wonderful old photos, the book explores a mother-daughter relationship during the years when the mother’s quiet voice gently shaped the daughter’s perception of the world.