I picked The Yearling for my book club because it was spring and I wanted something that had a spring-like feel to it. The Yearling definitely fits that description. It is a wonderful novel in many ways, although you need to make sure that you have a box of tissues at hand for the ending. However, it takes quite a while to get there. Rawlings had an incredible ability to paint a scene in words, and both my fellow book club members and I agree that this is both the strength and the weakness of the book. She takes such meticulous time describing the Florida scrub that her characters live in that it takes a good 250 pages to get to the real action of the story. Nonetheless, if you have the time and the patience for it this is a beautiful story about the difficulties one experiences when leaving childhood and entering adulthood.