Anne Beiler with Shawn Smucker. A Twist of Faith. Thomas Nelson. 2008.

The author, Anne Beiler, says of her life:

Thinking back on my life, the twists and turns it's taken, I feel truly amazed that I am whole. Sometimes even now I cannot believe how high the highs were, or how low the lows--emotionally I went to the very brink of hell and back...

Anne began making pretzels in 1987 for the owner of a farmer's market in Burtonsville, Maryland, a five-hour round-trip drive from her little Pennsylvania town where she lived in a mobile home with her husband Jonas and two daughters. Her entire family lived on the same property, where she'd grown up a poor Amish-Memmonite girl, attending Maple Grove Mennonite Church.

The pretzel business came after a long, hard bout of deep depression from losing her three-year-old daughter Angie. Counseling with her church's pastor took an unforeseen twist that only deepened her guilt and suffering, as well as causing a split in her close-knit family.

Anne, however, was a hard worker and an industrious young woman and when finding an opportunity to own her own stand at a market close to home, she grabbed at it. From there, as they say, the rest is history. That little stand became her first pretzel store and the birth of a now famous recipe. The same soft, doughy pretzels that are sold in malls across the world!

But with success did not come total security and happiness. Too much had happened in Anne's life that affected not only her but her family as well, especially her two daughters. Worry and torment became items she carried with her wherever she went, no matter what exotic country she found herself in making business deals.

The story flips back and forth between present day and past events, and at times while reading I wished the story would have been told straight through with maybe only an occasional back story. But, that being said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the story and realized I was hanging on to the pace and anxious to see how it all turned out.

This is a great story of struggle and survival, both in business and in relationships, including the relationship with self. It's a story of forgiveness that left a mark on me. The book is available at Amazon.