The Bitter End Birding Society

In the late 1950s in Bitter End, Tenn., a prohibited romance between the moonshiner’s daughter and the preacher’s son sets off a firestorm of events with consequences for decades to come.

Viola has always wanted to escape the Appalachian Mountains to see the wider world. It’s not that she doesn’t love the beauty of nature all around her, but she feels smothered by the dearth of educational opportunities and exciting experiences in what seems to her to be a dead-end place.

When Viola meets Trilby, they instantly gravitate to each other, but they hide their growing love because Viola knows her father will be enraged if he finds out. When he does exactly that, Viola is excommunicated from her family and banished from Bitter End.

Sixty-six years later, Ana Leigh Watkins is drawn to Bitter End after a traumatic event at the school where she teaches kindergarten. Several years beforehand while doing a college course on genealogy she had discovered that her great-aunt Cora resided in Bitter End, and now Cora has invited Ana to come for the summer and help her clean out her home in preparation for retirement living. Ana can’t wait to get away from her community and “the incident,” as she refers to it, as well as all the expectations of her that resulted from it.

When Ana arrives in Bitter End, her vision of how the summer will play out is extinguished as Cora makes unanticipated decisions and warns Ana of dangers she can’t fully grasp. But what seems at first to be a huge disappointment becomes anything but as Ana is drawn into the local birding society, a motley group of people that eventually form a deep bond and help her to come to terms with her family’s past and her present-day trauma.

Author Amanda Cox’s dual narrative, filled with satisfying plot twists and surprises, grapples with the messiness of a sinful world in the light of biblical hope and explores themes of grace, forgiveness, redemption, the healing power of God’s creation, and new beginnings.

(Revell)