Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? by Rhoda Janzen

"Isn’t that an off-brand religion?” One of my son’s soon-to-be-relatives asked this question when he was introduced as having grown up in a Mennonite family.

If Mennonites are off-brand to many Americans, then Pentecostals might be known as firebrands. The average person knows very little about either faith. Rhoda Janzen, who has moved from the former to the latter, brings awareness to both by chronicling her sometimes calamitous, sometimes hilarious and now mystical experiences of the past five years, as seen in the context of her 48-year spiritual journey.

Janzen landed at the number one spot on the New York Times best-seller list with her first memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. She begins her second memoir, Does This Church Make Me Look Fat?, by recapping some of the plot details from the first book: a divorce and an auto accident followed by a four-month recuperation visit to her Mennonite family in Fresno, California, after she had “fallen away” from that faith for many years. By the end of her first memoir she had returned to the dating scene, and the reader met, among others, Mitch, an unlikely suitor sporting a large Jesus nail around his neck.