Show notes
A farmer is dead and a man is on trial for it. Beth has spent years married to Frank on the farm his family has worked for generations, and her first love has just moved back to the village with a son of his own. Full spoilers throughout. Content note: child death.
Alex and Lindsey get into deferred maintenance as the novel’s governing metaphor, the rotting oak and the dilapidated farmhouse standing in for everything this family refuses to say out loud. They work through Jimmy, stuck at eleven since his mother died and never once offered actual help, and the gap between how carefully these men handle a gun and how casually they handle a dangerous tree. Plus Frank and Gabriel as opposite kinds of love, one asking whether a problem can be ours and the other insisting it’s yours, and whether Frank’s bottomless grace makes him a good man or a beaten one.
One of them got angry enough to shut the book and go to bed. The other read it in a single day. They also disagree about how much a reader should judge a character before seeing where they end up, and whether Gabriel’s ending is a failure of the book or exactly what he earned.
Also: the Of Mice and Men clue on page 120, what the last chapter’s title tells you, and small-town weddings as a lost art.
Cry count and ratings at the end.