She Treads Softly: Bitter End Birding Society

Saturday, August 9, 2025

Bitter End Birding Society

Bitter End Birding Society by Amanda Cox
8/19/25; 336 pages
Revell

Bitter End Birding Society by Amanda Cox is a very highly recommended faith-based domestic drama that follows two timelines. It explores trauma, forgiveness, healing, and redemption along with enjoying nature and others while bird watching.

Teacher Ana Leigh Watkins protected her kindergarten class from a shooter, but now she needs to escape from the attention and heal herself. When her great-aunt Cora asks her to spend the summer in Bitter End (Roan Mountain), Tennessee helping her prepare her house to sell, Ana accepts the offer to get away. When she arrives, Cora is leaving for a cruise, but she leaves lists of tasks for Ana along with contacts should Ana need help or have questions. Ana meets neighbor Sam, a shepherd who also needs healing, Jake & Inez, and Marilyn, Cora's sworn enemy who seems perfectly nice. Marilyn leads the Bitter End Birding Society, a small group of amateur birders, and Ana joins them (along with a dog she adopts).

The second story line is set in 1959 and follows Ana’s grandmother Viola Whitt, Cora's older sister. They were daughters of Ruby and the local moonshiner Wild Wayne. When the new Reverend and Mrs Quincy Chambers and their children Trilby and Marilyn arrive to keep a small church going, Marilyn and Cora are immediately best friends. Viola and Trilby fall in love, which results in her father disowning her. All of this history still was unknown to Ana.

This is really a beautiful, well written novel with a faith based message. All of the characters are experiencing some kind of emotional and physical issue and need healing, forgiveness and redemption in their lives. Ana's goal to escape actually results in a transformative journey and the healing that all the characters need to experience. Each of them have to face their past event to find freedom from the emotional burdens they are carrying. Their birding adventures help to assist in this.

This may be the tale of a family's extended history and healing, but it is also a character driven drama. The novel is successful not only because of the message embedded in the narrative, but also because all the characters are realistically portrayed as unique, fully realized individuals with both strengths and weaknesses. All the characters are struggling with something and need healing and restoration in some way. They all learn to trust God to get them through

Bitter End Birding Society is a great choice for those who enjoy Christian based fiction and a tales of healing and friendship. It would also be a perfect book club selection. Thanks to Revell for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.