In Amanda Cox’s newest novel, The Bitter End Birding Society, Bitter End is a small town in eastern Tennessee with a variety of legends about how it got its name.
Ana Leigh Watkins, the most recent newcomer to Bitter End, plans to spend the summer helping her great aunt Cora sort through her belongings in preparation for selling her house and moving to a retirement community. In reality, Ana needs time away to recuperate from her year of teaching kindergarten. She’s regarded as a hero for confronting a school shooter who entered her classroom. But she remembers the fear in the young man’s eyes and feels she escalated a situation that could have been resolved peacefully. She can’t forgive herself for the young man’s fate and the trauma caused to her students. The praise she receives only weighs her down further.
Ana gets adopted by a stray dog. While taking him for a walk one day, she runs into a neighbor with a group of birdwatchers who invite her to join them. She learns her aunt is bitter enemies with the head of the bird-watching group. As Ana gently investigates further, she discovers a story over sixty years old of a moonshiner’s daughter, Viola, who falls in love with a preacher’s son. The tragedies that befell them are still having repercussions.
The narrative switches back and forth between Ana’s and Viola’s points of view.
I just discovered Amanda a few years ago and have read all of her books except a novella. I’ve loved every one. The stories are well-written and the characters are easy to identify and empathize with and root for. Their situations tug on the heartstrings, but gentle humor is laced throughout as well. Grace and redemption are underlying themes.
Some of the quotes that stood out to me:
I thought I could fit everything into tidy boxes and sort right from wrong. But now I see that sometimes a saint acts like a sinner. And sometimes a sinner acts like a saint.
Those lines can seem pretty blurry sometimes. One can look just like the other from the outside. I’d say that the difference comes down to the heart. A lost sheep wants to come home but can’t for some reason. Something is getting in their way. But a prodigal is running in the opposite direction on purpose. You can’t make someone come home if they don’t want to.
It was a mystery how some trinkets and knickknacks were alive with meaning and memory while others were soulless souvenirs.
Did he know that what he needed for his pain was healing, not an anesthetic? The numbness he felt was not a cure. Anesthesia was not the sort of thing a body could live on.
Healing was an ongoing journey without a fixed destination.
Sometimes things don’t come to a tidy conclusion. Words are left unsaid. Things are left undone. But this life is not the end. . . . . Our present circumstances, our perceived failures, they are not final.
I loved that the birding society visited the Seven Islands State Birding Park, which I have been to.
I listened to the audiobook read by Rachel Botchan, who had a distracting habit of taking a breath in odd places. But otherwise, I enjoyed her narration.
The audiobook does not include the author’s notes, but Amanda has linked to a few interviews she did about this book here, and I found another one here.
Stray Thoughts 