Non-Review: Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

 The next random book on the list was Swan Song, available on Hoopla.  I cannot make myself continue to read this one, not right now anyway.  Post-apocalyptic, it seems that one main character struggles with mental illness and addiction.  Full of violence and people being horrible.  I don't want to sit in that world right now.

Review: Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

 I randomly selected this book from the list I posted yesterday.  I knew very little about it, just that it was most often on reading lists for older children.

Coming to this book in 2021 was very different than if I had read this when I was a kid.  The main subject is hunting and a rather grisly form of hunting at that!  The author was born in 1918 and clearly has a great fondness for coon dogs and racoon hunting.  He also seems to be a Christian and proud American as well.  All of these things are handled gracefully and I can see why it was seen as a children's book.  The killings are mostly off-screen and there is no romance.  Even most of the challenges the main character takes on are described as almost easy.

It is a pleasant story, couched as the reminiscence of an older man back to a time he remembered fondly from his childhood.  But, it is also the story of a very young boy who trains two dogs to kill hundreds of animals for their pelts.  Sad ending, too.  I have very mixed feelings about it.  It has some of the same feel as To Kill a Mockingbird although there are no racial overtones here, and no moral lessons beyond "dogs love people".  And a little bit of "God answers prayers mostly".

I was able to check this out of my local library electronically and it is a short book.  I don't feel the time spent reading it was wasted.

Review: Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

 I had a hard time with this book.  It was written from the point of view of someone struggling with mental illness and it tended to make me feel a bit mentally ill as well.  Also, the plot lines are contrived to keep the ending a mystery and I didn't really appreciate that.  It was a bit like "I see dead people" and since I had an inkling about the "twist" at the end, it wasn't really worth all the back-and-forth.  I read it for a book club otherwise I might not have finished reading it.  I also got it through Kindle Unlimited so I didn't have to pay for it, another good thing.

I didn't know a single thing about the book ahead of time, which was good.  I jumped right in without any warning and I think that helped.  On the other hand, I could tell that there must be a reason the author kept manipulating the timeline and that brought me out of the story a lot.  It is also a pretty bleak sort of place where this takes place, a sort of parallel world and it was HEAVY on my heart to dwell there.  There was an impossible happy ending, but it felt a bit too tacked on for me to feel as if the ending redeemed the dark journey it took to get there.