Chapter 19: A Book You Started and Never Finished

The Orchardist,  Amanda Coplin

It's been a while since I was here to talk books. I blame this book for that. It was supposed to fall into a different category. It was supposed to be a compelling story, beautiful prose, a recommendation. Instead it just kept putting me to sleep.

Coplin's tale is about an old guy who lives on a large orchard. He should be named Joe White he's so boring. I wanted to like him. I wanted to feel how haunted he is by the loss of his sister. I wanted him to find some sort of soul salve in the branches of the fruit trees. But, no, he just lets life happen around him. He's kind. That's the nice thing I can say about him.

So this guy lives alone and two pregnant teenage girls show up in his orchard but won't interact with them directly and he decides to sort of adopt them. The more feral girl, who probably could tell a good story, is not long for the world and we are left with Boring Guy and Dumb Boring Girl. She's had a really hard life and is detached from pretty much everything except horses. At this point I gave up.

The part of the book I did read could have been fleshed out into it's own novel with a bizarre resolution to a mystery, but that is not the route Coplin took. Heroin and sexual slavery are just kind of glossed over so we can focus on how boring the main guy is.

There's also a practical midwife who might be a good character, but she isn't given much page space except to call her by her first and last name every time she is mentioned, a device that quickly becomes, you guessed it, boring.

So, I might give this one a try again in the future. But for now, I want to read a story that does something besides cure my insomnia. After an trip to Book A Million, it looks like I've got some good material to share with you soon. Until then, The Orchardist gets half a Maria.