Counterpoint
Join the members of the Erie Reader Book Club for their Shop Local meeting, as they discuss the novel Strange as this Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake, an accomplished writer who was once a professor in the English Department at Penn State Behrend.
SUNDAY, NOV. 29
The Erie Reader Book Club will be reading and discussing Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake in conjunction with the Shop Local issue of the Reader.
While attending college at Penn State Behrend, managing editor and Erie Reader Book Club founder Erin Phillips had the pleasure of having this month’s book club author, Ann Pancake, as a professor. Although no longer local, the choice of her book to coincide with our Shop Local issue felt like the right pick as the themes within are a great match for the general taste of our regular attendees.
Set in present-day West Virginia, Strange as This Weather Has Been follows a coal mining family faced with the consequences of mountaintop removal and strip mining that is bringing the mountain life they once knew to an end. As the landscape around them shifts and layoffs become more frequent, the family struggles both at and away from home.
As tensions escalate within their home, the children are forced outside and into nature, which for them has only ever consisted of junk from the floods and felled trees. Fifteen-year-old Bant is a focal point within the family, and as one of the eldest of the children remembers a time before their lives were so fractured.
What follows is the story of the family’s struggle with losing the land they love to the industry to which they are tied, told through several first-person narrators within the family.
Pancake’s use of authentic dialect and cadence bring the novel to life, capturing the essence of a family and entire people who are so tied to the land on which they live but can just as easily lose.
1 p.m. // Werner Books and Coffee, 3608 Liberty St. // Free to join, cost of book not included // For more info: wernerbooks.com