Stuff I've read

September's book was The Orchardist, a novel by Amanda Coplin that details the lives of two young girls who escape a brothel and are taken in by a lonely orchardist.

This was a hard one. It was a book I would put on the shelf for days at a time, mustering up the courage to wade into it again, but once I opened it, I found myself totally submerged. Coplin writes with spectacular quality, her words firmly grounded on the page rather than leaping off of them.What I mean to say is that this book doesn't tell a story that happens around you; The Orchardist tells a story into which you disappear, completely.

William Talmadge has a history with his orchard; he started it alongside his mother and sister and cared for it after his mother died and his sister vanished. In town one day, he notices two pregnant girls nearby his fruit stand, and when they follow him back to his orchard, he feeds them, gives them a place to stay, and makes sure they're cared for as they prepare to give birth.

He raises a child for them, and the orchard becomes hers.

The Orchardist is an exquisite tale of pasts meeting presents, no matter how desperately we fight against it. How, even in the giving of second chances, we fall back into familiar tendencies. How life goes on, in spite of circumstances, and there can almost always be a hidden silver lining.

This is not a book for the fainthearted, the judgemental, or the impatient. But if you're any or all of those things (as we all so often are), read it and be changed.

It was the rapidity that overwhelmed him and bothered his sensibility. He had moved slowly all of his life. He was used to seeing things drawn out of themselves by temperature and light, not by harsh action. but this was something different. This was how people lived, now.

As soon as she realized the figures on the page meant something - could be strung together as words, and then sentences, and then paragraphs - she was covetous of the whole system. It seemed a new universe to her. And it was. Everything opened up. Some stories were meant to inform, and other were meant to entertain. And then other stories were separate from those - this the young teacher did not tell her, it was something Angelene figured out on her own, the first year, when a man visited and read them a poem out of a tome of poems - that seemed crafted to relay some secret, and even more than that, some secret about herself. Angelene was mesmerized. What was available for her to know? What secrets did the world hold? Which secrets would be revealed through soil, and which through words?