Our next book club: “The Yearling”

Join us for Book Club: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Since its inception, Orange Blossom Ordinary has operated with the motto, “One foot in Florida and one foot in the life of the mind.” We regularly read and review Floridian literature, and sometimes even interview Florida authors. The title of our review is an homage to our Floridian heritage.

And so, for book club, we also want to explore the “greats” of Floridian literature. We just covered Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which has indelible connections to Florida, despite the fact that the author was neither born in Florida nor is the novel set there. This summer, we’re going to turn our focus to another author who spent much of her life in Florida: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. (Coincidentally, Kinnan Rawlings and Hemingway shared the same editor, Maxwell Perkins.)

Kinnan Rawlings moved to Florida after her mother’s death in 1928. She used her small inheritance to buy a 72-acre orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a settlement known as Cross Creek. She quickly developed a deep connection to the area, so much so that when her husband wanted to leave, she divorced him. She spent her time studying the land, the animals, and the people of her new home, and brought both the area and backwoods Floridian culture international fame through her writing.

Her 1938 novel The Yearling, which we will read this summer, is one of her most enduring works. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1938 and was also the best-selling novel in the U.S. that year. Originally intended for younger readers, it is a coming-of-age story about a young boy named Jody as he adopts an orphaned fawn. It is set in the years following the Civil War in the Cross Creek area, and so much of it chronicles the landscapes and people Kinnan Rawlings knew best. We are looking forward to learning more as we read it this summer, and we hope you’ll join us! (We’ll be meeting on Zoom.)

Here is our schedule:

6/16: Chapters 1-7

6/30: Chapters 8-12

7/14: Chapters 13-16

7/28: Chapters 17-20

8/11: Chapters 21-25

8/25: Chapters 27-33

To sign up, fill out this form.